Screen
O'Brien, Tom
ETHNIC COLORINGS 'EMPEROR,' 'THE DEAD,' & 'WANNSEE' he Last Emperor is sprawling, untidy, sometimes confusing, and often superb. A successful attempt by Bernardo Bertolucci to recoup some of...
...a Japanese fascist yells at Pu Yi, reminding us that their World War began before Pearl Harbor and had dynamics independent of Western will or knowledge...
...It is in this private, poetic conclusion that the problem of the whole film becomes evident...
...Bertolucci's real subject is history: viewed with cold brilliance (as in his 7900) or with the sensuous eroticism of his Last Tango...
...after an attempt at suicide, it flashes back to his infancy and youth inside the enclosed Forbidden City nearly five decades before...
...It lasts only eighty-two minutes, the exact length of the episode in German history on which it is based: the meeting at which second-level Nazis worked out details of the ' 'final solution.'' The film, produced and directed by Manfred Korytowski, is an exercise in calculated coldness...
...It would be easy to dismiss this entirely as propaganda if Bertolucci weren't so successful in suggesting that, in the Chinese context, at least some Communists were less corrupt than monarchists or nationalists, and less racist than the Japanese...
...Music also dominates a last key scene at the party, when Gabriel's wife Greta (Anjelica Huston, the director's daughter, and the indomitable Mae Rose of Prizzi's Honor) is moved to distraction by a folk song, "The Lass of Aughrim...
...It replaces the question of "Who lost China...
...Bertolucci repeatedly has him attempting to run through palace or garrison gates to ¦ escape into the world outside: someone always closes him in...
...Despite some inevitable confusion in chronology, the flashbacks don't simply tell the story...
...It is also a beautitul tribute to Ireland, a nation that too often is represented in our media only by terrorist bombings of the IRA...
...the only Westerner is Pu Yi's tutor, played by Peter O'Toole, in one of his usual "not-entirely-there" modes...
...No doubt Bertolucci had reasons to make a politic film...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...Only one participant in the affair raises the slightest objections, and these only over the technical determination of the Jewishness of Germans of mixed background...
...Gabriel winds up, like other Joyce main characters, talking to himself, precisely because the author, even at his most social, just doesn't believe enough in community to make it the key to his style...
...Joyce wrote The Dead and placed it at the end of Dubliners as a gesture for Ireland, not (as usual with him, against...
...so too is wild, exuberant beauty and energy...
...gorgeous, extravagant imperial yellows and crimsons in the eye of memory...
...Shakespeare's soliloquies lead to action...
...Faults are easy to find in this film...
...the decanters, furnishings, curtains, all play on warm variants of brown or red...
...The Last Emperor has some of its sloppiest—and also most vivid — moments during those episodes in which Japan uses Pu Yi as its puppet...
...he Wannsee Conference is a brief film that deserves a note...
...Indeed, in some prison sequences, one dedicated Communist (played by a Chinese actor, Ying Ruo Cheng, who is now Peking's deputy minister of culture) is presented humanely...
...But soliloquy fails here...
...Still, despite its defects, The Last Emperor has some of the genuine flavor...
...it keeps the film emotionally Asian...
...The Last Emperor uses the evolution of Chinese society as background to Pu Yi's biography...
...An old Protestant (politely described as "of the other persuasion") comes in...
...One feels sympathetically the shock to Pu Yi's system just in the colors Bertolucci uses: gray green, or black and gray monochromes in the prison...
...Events lead to one of Joyce's special, secular, psychological "epiphanies": the story itself is one of the few occasions when his skill with puns and symbols was thoroughly aligned with narrative texture...
...From his earliest youth, Pu Yi is seen more as a prisoner of circumstances than their ruler...
...Bertolucci has made a fine history film precisely because there is so little reference to the West...
...The adult Pu Yi is John Lone, a Chinese American actor (The Iceman) who carefully catches the pathos of the last emperor's position...
...he also brings us back to the image of Aunt Julia, with Gabriel anticipating her wake...
...We see them from the beginning, as Gabriel's two aunts, the aging, pallid, white-haired Julia Morkan (Cathleen Delany), and slightly younger, auburn-haired Aunt Kate (Helena Carroll), eagerly look down a bannister to espy each guest that arrives...
...Huston sticks as close as possible to his source, but that itself may be the problem...
...It's a delight to behold, especially in the ad-hoc concertizing scenes and the culmination of the party, when Gabriel (Donal McCann) toasts his aunts and cousin (Ingrid Craigie) as "the three graces of the Dublin musical world...
...the imperial title he holds is, from the beginning, a mere shadow of the real power that Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, other warlords, and Communists fight for in the world outside the palace...
...they reinforce the theme of contrast between two systems of value...
...The plot thus becomes a kind of historical "waiting for Godot...
...Unlike many films about "third-world" countries, The Last Emperor is almost entirely Asian in focus...
...We are the greatest race in Asia...
...You can feel the weight of Huston's sense of mortality, and his affection for life, behind every shot...
...The film opens with Pu Yi's internment in a Communist "re-education" center in 1949...
...The rest of the party is all sepia: the younger women are all redheads and brunettes...
...What seems "delicate" in the rest of Huston's film verges toward "slight...
...Ironically, Pu Yi makes his worst mistake when he thinks that he behaves most independently, fleeing China for Manchuria to set up what he thinks will be a restored empire under Japanese protection...
...The Last Emperor was filmed in Peking—indeed, inside the exotic, imperial "Forbidden City," the complex of palaces that Communist authorities have closed off for several decades...
...Readers may recall the story's plot: the aunts of the Irish writer Gabriel Conroy have invited him and other guests for their annual "Twelfth Night" Epiphany party...
...The cast is almost entirely Chinese or Chinese-American, including some faces from recent San Franciscan films like Dim Sum, such as the glamorous Joan Chen, who plays Pu Yi's wife...
...Korytowski manages to make this suspenseful by suggesting, from the beginning, that some participants may have objections of some kind to the plans...
...Instead, Korytowski gives us the Holocaust via Hannah Arendt: the film depicts the banality of genocide at a tipsy board meeting...
...he's played by veteran brogue-master Dan O'Herlihy, who sports a gigantic, shocking white mane far beyond "venerable...
...When Gabriel and Greta return to their hotel, he learns the reason why, prompting his "epiphany," a kind of lyrical examen de conscience...
...he Dead is the last film of John Huston, who died this summer, bringing to a close the end of a career spanning The Maltese Falcon to Prizzi's Honor...
...Huston knew he was dying and intended this film as an appropriate goodbye...
...The Wannsee Conference thus works by invoking the "shock of the bland": it is one of the purest exercises ever in outraged understatement...
...this doesn't mean it isn't provocative, or without some truth...
...The only question is an irksome aesthetic one: can Joyce's story really work as a film...
...The lead is played by various actors at different ages, including a cherubic Chinese child (Richard Vuu...
...there is none of the high drama that one expects would be associated with such an event...
...Bertolucci maintains this apposite structure throughout the rest of the film, cutting between the drab monotony of a 18 December 1987: 747 Have a blessed Christmas & a joyful New Year...
...Huston has shot the film as a war between the colors of death and age and the colors of mature, energy-filled life...
...Joyce's lead to reverie...
...Like the current crop of films from Russia (Dark Eyes, Theme, Repentance), the film is a cinematic expression of glasnost (or at least its Far Eastern equivalent...
...but this posthumous swan-song is strongly romantic, elegiac, tender...
...with "Why did the Maoists find it...
...This defect is less apparent in prose than film, with its greater need for 748: Commonweal dramatic presentation...
...One is touched, but not moved...
...Huston, like Joyce, has always had a genius for irony...
...The acting is adequate to the task, especially McCann...
...Perhaps because of his unusual degree of access, Bertolucci...
...The Dead is splendidly photogenic...
...Huston tries to help with superbly lovely shots of Celtic crosses beneath the snow of the West of Ireland accompanying Gabriel's soliloquy...
...Bertolucci's nominal subject is Pu Yi, last emperor of the imperial Chinese dynasty, who ascended to the throne in the early part of this century and lived to see the Chinese civil war, the invasion by Japan, the triumph of Mao, even the Cultural Revolution...
...He has moved inside the skin of another culture, another race's experience of transition...
...has softened any possible criticism of Mao and his heirs...
...But while Huston succeeds exquisitely in portraying Joyce's external Epiphany, the internal one evades hirn...
...But in this case, O'Toole's diffidence only helps...
...Huston shoots the party in a series of choreographed tableaux dominated by two color schemes, stark white versus dark, brownish red...
...Viewers may recall Hollywood's studio mock-up of the entrance of the Forbidden City from Fifty-Five Days at Peking, a Cold-War treatment of the Boxer Rebellion as the first sign of the "yellow peril...
...But I frankly wonder if it could have been otherwise...
...The Last Emperor tries for more authentic views...
...He teases us with the possibility that some single but potent voice of humanitarian protest will be raised...
...From all of us at COMMONWEAL postwar socialist present and the bizarre, semi-feudal customs of the past...
...he wanted, he said, to commemorate some of its old-fashioned graciousness, hospitality, and love of fine music...
...The word "epic" is used too loosely to describe any large-scale historical film...
...A successful attempt by Bernardo Bertolucci to recoup some of his waning reputation as a director, it provides .some of the most stunning images of history and geography on screen in some time...
Vol. 114 • December 1987 • No. 22
