Childhood’s End

Bertolucci and his writing partner, Mark Peploe, structure this vast adventure with terrific clarity, and intelligence. As
the late screenwriter Waldo Salt observed, there is no such thing as a good flashback — only a flash-present, a detour that
follows a character’s forward movement through memories which enlarge our sense of the present and accelerate the story. Pu Yi is compelled to remember, but takes up the task with a wondering passion. In the film’s witty bestriding of time and space, his attempted suicide coincides with the moment he is torn from his mother. His toughest, most relentless nemesis
in the prison — The Governor (Ying Ruocheng), the man who saves him from suicide — emerges most fully as a character when he sits down to read the published memoirs of R.J. (Peter O’Toole), Pu Yi’s regal English tutor from the days of his imperial childhood.

The Governor and tutor are neatly paired, the better to prepare us for a central idea that goes unspoken for most of the film — that Pu Yi is not in prison to be punished, but to learn. Everyone, Bertolucci hints, is an emperor at birth — even if one’s empire is restricted to the loving gaze of one’s mother. What emerges most forcefully in the director’s cut is Pu Yi the man. The child, whose poignant anguish paved the path to all those Oscars, unfortunately eclipsed the mature adult in the original version, and with it buried the quiet immensity of John Lone’s performance. The hole Pu Yi digs for himself now feels universal — every one of us makes expensive choices when we break free into adulthood, most of which don’t come due till we’re in midlife.

The humility Pu Yi must come to if he’s to climb out of that hole regist -
ers wonderfully in Lone’s face. He communicates, in silence, the richness of the film’s politics, its history and humanity. The Last Emperor is not technically about therapy, but I can’t think of a film that has ever dramatized life’s healing pro cesses with greater thoroughness, or with a better sense of the life and history organized around the soul in transit. To see the film in full is to come away remembering two lives — your own, and Pu Yi’s.