You are going to a movie. It is a very well known and critically acclaimed movie and you are excited. But, Murphy’s law strikes and there is an accident on the highway. You get stuck in the traffic. When the road is finally clear, you have missed almost 2 hours of the movie. The total running time is little over 3.5 hours. Should you cancel? If the movie is The Last Emperor by Bernardo Bertolucci, go ahead and watch it. Why?
BECAUSE NOTHING HAPPENS IN THE MOVIE FOR THE FIRST TWO HOURS.
Here’s the thing. Bertolucci has no business making a movie about Chinese history. Do you know when was the first time he went to China? He visited China for the first time when he wanted to make the movie. He looks at China as a tourist would, because that’s what he is. He is enchanted by this “exotic” asian culture and tries to shoot it for the first two hours. It’s equivalent to a westerner flooding his social media with snaps from his first trip to Asia. Great photography but do you really need to endure it for two hours under the guise of meaningful cinema? Exotic is a favourite western term for Asian and other cultures that are “different.” I remember seeing this word on the cover of The Elephanta Suite by Paul Theroux. The story is based in India and the blurb from The Times (British) described it as something like “tale from an exotic land.” Yeah, right! You rule us for 200 years, loot all the gold and the diamonds (the word ‘loot’ itself is borrowed from Hindi!) and have the chutzpah to call us exotic.
So the fascinated westerner that is Bertolucci keeps on shooting the Forbidden City and the “exotic” dresses worn by the “exotic” servants of the “exotic” emperor who eats – you guessed it – “exotic” food! After showing in graphic detail how a wet nurse is selected for the little emperor – complete with a free mammogram test – Bertolucci’s voyeurism reaches its zenith when he shows a close up of the emperor’s poop. An apt metaphor for the movie no doubt or perhaps the poop was also – what’s the word – “exotic”? What I felt after watching that scene is succinctly described in this gif.
The most hilarious aspect of The Last Emperor is this. All the Chinese people in the movie – from the peasants to the servants to the Emperor himself – speak in Chinese accented bad English. Here is the Chinese language that is 3000 years old, has 20,000-50,000 characters and is an integral part of the Chinese culture and Bertolucci dismisses it without a single thought. Mind you, it’s not as if Bertolucci is averse to making movies in foreign languages. In fact, since his mother tongue is Italian, all of his English movies are foreign language movies. And look how carefully he handles the French language and French culture in his movies. He even made Marlon Brando speak bad French in The Last Tango in Paris. Can you imagine two French characters speaking to each other in English in a Bertolucci movie? Of course not, because Bertolucci thinks that the French culture is too important to be trifled with. What about the Chinese culture? Che ne frega (Who cares)? To add to the confusion, the Japanese characters in the movie speak in Japanese. Why? Nobody knows. The only comment I could think of was this Italian gesture that is worth a thousand words.
Ma che gran casino, signor Bertolucci!! 🙄 🙄 🙄
A curious thing happens near the end of the movie. In a march of people protesting for the Cultural revolution in 1967 with banners of Mao, the protestors shout the slogans in Chinese. The protagonist stops one of the protestors and asks him in English about one person who is held captive. The protestor replies in English and goes back to shouting slogans in Chinese. This continues for a while and the protestor keeps switching from English to Chinese and back. Bertolucci does not care which language is spoken by which Asian characters because it’s all Latin and Greek to him. And to think that this abomination actually won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay!
Does this mean that a director cannot make a movie about a foreign culture? Of course not. But it is going to be extra hard and the director needs to have the sensitivity to appreciate and respect the foreign culture. Richard Attenborough made history with Gandhi but it took him 20 years to get everything right. The movie clearly is in the list of greatest fifty movies ever made. Ang Lee, who has Taiwanese roots, made Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility come alive on screen with such fine sensitivity that I dare say, a British director could not have done better. By the way, Ang Lee’s films Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman show authentic Chinese/Taiwanese culture with superb sensitivity.
As if the language fiasco was not enough, The Last Emperor is not accurate historically either. For those of you fortunate enough not to have seen it, it is based on the life of Puyi (Chinese: 溥儀; 1906 – 1967) who was last emperor of China. He was a defendant at the Tokyo Trial and was later imprisoned as a war criminal. In prison he was heavily brainwashed and was forced to write his autobiography that was guided and censored by the Chinese government. The Last Emperor is based on Puyi’s autobiography. In other words, it shows the official Chinese government version of the events. By showering it with Oscars, the Academy implicitly agreed with this sanitised version of Chinese history.
Bertolucci was an open supporter of the Italian Communist party. The authentic cinematography of the movie, first one to be shot in the Forbidden City, came at a very high price – the truth itself. The Cultural Revolution at the end of the movie was shown as a beginning of a happy period, with people dancing and singing in the streets. The brutality, if any, was shown to be very mild. In reality, the number of people killed during the Cultural Revolution is estimated to be between 500,000 to eight million. Ironically, two years after The Last Emperor showed the Chinese people living happily ever after, 10,000 people were murdered in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
It is just a 5-min walk from the Forbidden City where bulk of The Last Emperor was filmed.
