"The Last Emperor" Retrospective: A Forgotten Oscars Powerhouse

Bernardo Bertolucci's lavish lament on China's last monarch deserves a place in cinema's pantheon.

February 26, 2023

By 1908, the Qing dynasty had ruled China for nearly 300 years. As with many monarchies in the early 20th century, it collapsed under the weight of rapid modernization. It was not the rise of egalitarianism so much as recognizing that it was spreading across the world like wildfire. If those people over there do not live that way, why should we?

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In 1918, Russia turned on its monarchy in a revolution that saw the royal family summarily executed and the Soviet Union instill a cult of personality for the man responsible. It was the same year that Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire crumbled. Austria abolished its monarchy, as did Hungary. The Ottoman Empire got partitioned: none of the nations that comprised it are monarchies today.

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It was a time of changing ideals, when rulers realized the true power of their people, and those people seized the opportunities that power afforded them. In China, Empress Dowager Cixi faced similar woes in 1901 after the Boxer Rebellion and clung to power with a series of reforms aimed at constitutional monarchy.

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She died in 1908, leaving China divided and vulnerable. If ever there was a time for the monarchy to justify its existence to its increasingly restless populace, now was the time.

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But time was not a factor to her chosen successor: he was only 2.

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As a toddler, Puyi was ill-equipped to assess or meet China's needs. He did not have a concept of the outside world. After all, from the day he entered the Forbidden City, he was not permitted to leave it.

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His entire life, everything he knew, was, and could ever become, was contained inside those walls. He was a creation of circumstances and the people who benefited from that creation. The hundreds of eunuchs at his disposal exploited his youth for their gain, pillaging the palaces and setting their crimes ablaze when Puyi suspected their treachery.

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But if he was a victim of his isolation, so too were the people around him. While the world outside the Forbidden City evolved, inside its walls tradition was king. Puyi got treated like a divine entity, which by the laws of those traditions, he was.

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Every day he got served a luxurious buffet for lunch, most of which went untouched, and received brand new clothes. He could command whatever from whomever whenever he desired and exacted heavy tolls for minor transgressions. He frequently had the eunuchs flogged and once sought to have one eat a cake with iron filings inside.

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So what does The Last Emperor, winner of 9 Academy Awards at the 60th Oscars in 1988, make of this boy monarch, baptized into deification, marred by circumstances outside his control, and forced into a life that sought to strip away the only one he had ever known?

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What most biopics fail to do: say something, mean something, and be something.

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It does not shy away from shying away: the full extent of Puyi’s cruelty gets lost on the movie, which settles for showing the child as a brat who rejoices in seeing his eunuchs punished for his misdeeds and proving his phantom power by forcing a man to drink ink. It does not give us the whole reality from the time he assumes the throne as a toddler to climbing the steps of the Forbidden City in his later years.

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But it does give us an understanding of how all he creates, endures, suffers, and inflicts, serves a very human cause.

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Puyi is a boy ordained with great purpose he cannot understand, and like any child, works that purpose through a sieve to capture the divinity while leaving behind the obligation. Tradition and treatment are not concepts he acknowledges or respects. He only knows himself and to what he is entitled.

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But in all the ways the tragedy of his life feels of his own making, we never forget how the world detached itself from him. It stole his only friend and kept him locked away with no one to show him love, affection, care, or concern. His importance is unconditionally conditional: so long as he is emperor, he is divine; the moment that gets lost, so is he.

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Thus we watch as this boy grows into a man, with purpose just as potent in its self-actualization as dependent on the thoughts and whims of others, doing everything he can to hold onto the only sense of self he has ever known. He cannot bear confinement or losing what matters most, but he frequently gets denied what is his by human, not divine, right.

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His reformation of the Forbidden City gets thwarted by the eunuchs who torch the palace to mask their crimes. He gets appointed Emperor of Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state in Northeast China, but his authority gets undermined at every turn. Advisors and ambassadors get appointed without his consent; meetings get scheduled without his knowledge; his signature on legislation is a formality. When he encourages Japanese delegates to consider making Manchukuo an independent nation, thus making him an emperor again, he gets swiftly rebuffed.

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The sting of that realization is palpable. Even through hesitating to sign documents while silently realizing powerlessness, Puyi has always believed that he is power. He knows nothing else, but he must know it now. He has no other choice.

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The Last Emperor studies what being human means when our humanity gets stolen, when our autonomy gets robbed from us and then thrown back in our face. What happens when we have our identity determined for us, but it becomes so much who we are that we do not know what it means to make it ourselves? What use is our will if the only path we know is the path of most resistance?

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But instead of asking the questions and passing itself off as profound, The Last Emperor answers them with a balance that respects the personal journey of Puyi as much as the relationship we must have with him for his story to resonate.

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He does not wish to renounce his ties with Japan, even under tense interrogation in a Chinese political rehabilitation camp. Why should he? Doing so is forsaking all he has ever been and known. Without being Emperor of Manchukuo, he cannot justify being Emperor of China, which is to say his life had no meaning or purpose at all.

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But as he watches the stories of Japan’s brutality in the Second World War, his guilt consumes him. He realizes all he has sacrificed by sacrificing so much. He gave away his humanity, pride, heart, and voice for a cause he never learned outside his own perspective. At last, he understands: the world is more than what he sees.

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We also must realize this. We cannot expect our world to take shape if we do not shape it, but shaping it requires understanding it. Each moment we live is a moment for somebody else, even if we are all alone. Our lives mean something. We are thought of and about, acted for and against, coveted and hated, liked and loathed. We occupy a place in the world independent of the one we carve out for ourselves. We must stare all we are and have done, whether by intent or by mistake, whether good or bad, in the face. We must make choices.

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Puyi’s choice is to give in to the instinct most resist: feel guilt. Feel shame and conflict, responsibility and doubt. Wonder if you have ever been what you have claimed or can get there if you have failed. Let yourself take accountability without compromising your sense of worth. We do not have to condemn ourselves in the same breath we punish.

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Puyi’s choices justify his story. We, and thus a movie about us, can hope for little more than that. He is not just a man of many experiences and deeds, someone who did much and saw much and meant much and then died. He is a genuine person. He has all the generalities of a great man and all the specifics of a bad one. He is worth our time because his story teaches us how best to spend that time.

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The Last Emperor is as technically sound as any epic and just as flawed in the same way. It is lensed to perfection, though unimaginative in muting the prison camp and saturating the past. It is pieced together awkwardly as it hurries its way through some parts of Puyi’s life but edited to show how each reflection on the past affects his evolving perceptions in the present.

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It creates a parallel between Puyi’s ignorance of the changing landscape as he remains confined to the Forbidden City, which inspires as much empathy for the boy as frustration for our sensibilities. The dialogue can be as tight in his reflections and ambitions as corny in its emotional peaks. It shows just as often as it tells, forcing us to come to it when Puyi needs us most and leaving itself to come to us whenever it does not trust us to understand the story.

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But The Last Emperor knows that a biopic should be more than a history book. It must justify its subject and earn our investment in him, why his life is more than a self-contained journey through a time we did not experience and thus cannot truly understand.

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For all the ways he is distanced from us, he is us, and we are him. He gets trapped in a world that is quickly deteriorating and is powerless to stop it. He clings to the only sense of self he has ever known as the world conspires to define him. He is seeking inner understanding because no one has ever given him their own.

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All of this happens to us more frequently and more severely than we would like to admit. When it does, we can think back on Puyi: a man forged by circumstance, struggling to define himself, but in the end, the author of his fate. He was “the last emperor,” but in truth, he proves much more than that.