Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • 101

Film review THE HARTFORD COURANT 'THE LAST EMPEROR' THURSDAY FEBRUARY 4, 1988 Scenery can't save 'Emperor' I.W....U.JIW II i il.ii i By MALCOLM L. JOHNSON Courant Film Critic ft 1M i -Mm hi Columbia Pictures John Lone as Pu Yi, the imperial emperor, is exiled from Beijing's Forbidden City after a republican warlord captures the city. a few moments of horrific violence, including a close-up of an execution. sadness cannot be blamed on John Lone, whose performance as Pu Yi is exemplary, shifting from gray withdrawal, to ingenuous imperiousness, to wrenching self-recognition, to late tranquillity. Although his old-age makeup looks like it came from a Halloween kit, Lone physically conveys Pu Yi's stiffening and slowing in his aloof days as a prisoner of Mao's re-education programs and as a contented gardener in Beijing's Botanical.

Gardens. And in the early scenes, when Pu Yi is driven from the Forbidden City, lives the life of a playboy in the North and reigns as emperor as the puppet of the Japanese in Manchuria, Lone fashions a complex portrait of an intelligent but confused man trying to make sense and order of an impossible life. But Bertolucci's attempt to make an Asian "Citizen Kane" is doomed by his concentration on decor and camera movements rather than on drama. Much of "The Last Emperor" consists of elaborately staged set pieces from the richly costumed masses serried in the Forbidden City for the coronation of the impetuous 3-year-old "Lord of Ten Thousand Years" to the serpentine-strewn parties of his days as a Westernized playboy. Running through "The Last Emperor" is the theme of Pu Yi's isolation.

Shut since childhood in the Forbidden City, he is at first unaware of the changes taking place among his people outside the huge, locked gate. His Scottish tutor, acted in studied Mandarin fashion by Peter O'Toole, gives him magazines, but these just fill the boy emperor with dreams of living in the West Later, radio brings news of China, but Pu Yi feels only betrayed. Finally, when he sees a compilation of newsreels during his re-education, the deposed emperor at last recgonizes the enormity of his collaborations with the Japanese. Beijing's towering, austere, labyrinthine Forbidden City, ancient home of China's royal family, has become "a theater without an audience," the narrator's voice intones perhaps a third of the way into "The Last Emperor." It is a theater, the voice continues, where "the actors steal the scenery." Bernardo Bertolucci's epic of Pu Yi, encompassing more than half a century of the long unhappy life of the final divine ruler to sit on the Dragon Throne, is theater that surely will attract a fascinated audience, although not a huge one. But those who witness this historic re-creation of history may feel that the scenery steals from the actors.

As the first film about modern China made by Westerners, featuring extensive use of the spectacular and foreboding Forbidden City, "The Last Emperor" at first comes across as an overpowering spectacle. Its opening scenes hold out the promise that this will be film-making to equal or surpass the greatest achievements of epic film-making, from D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" to Kurosawa's "Ran." The first transition is especially stunning as the film jumps suddenly from a faded man who has cut his wrists in a drab washroom, to gold-and-red images of didly caparisoned horsemen charging into a palace. But "The Last Emperor" soon loses its hypnotic powers. By the time the screenplay by Mark Peploe and Bertolucci begins to work, its theater-audience-actors-scenery metaphors, this epic has sunk into an undra-matic affair, glorious to look upon but devoid of emotional force.

Its dwindling away to a feeling of autumnal The newsreel is not the only touch of "Kane." There is also the removal of the child from his mother at an early age, a relic of his childhood discovered at the climax (in this case, "Rosebud" is a cricket cage) and a tragic relationship with his empress, shaded from haughty sophistication and to broken poignancy by the beautiful Joan Chen. But although there are elements of universality in this story of a man shielded from reality, it's difficult to feel much pity for this poor little rich boy. At its best, "The Last Emperor" achieves a grandeur as it recreates an almost incredible lost world to the stirring music of Japan's Ryuichi Sakamoto and of David Byrne. But for too much of the nearly three hours, Bertolucci seems merely to be playing a profligate emperor of the cinema with millions to spend and thousands to command. THE LAST EMPEROR, Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci; screenplay by Mark Peploe and Bertolucci; director of photography, Vittorio Storaro; music composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Byrne and Cong Su; production designer, Ferdinando Scarfiotti; edited by Gabriella Cristiani; produced by Jeremy Thomas.

A Columbia Pictures release, opening Friday at Cinema City, Hartford. Running time: 167 minutes Pu Yi (adult) John Lone Wan Jung Joan Chen Reginald Johnston Peter O'Toole Governor Ying Ruo Cheng Chen Pao Shen Victor Wong Big Li Dennis Dun Amakasu Ryuichi Sakamoto Ar Mo's Father Li Wei Pu Yi (3 years) Richard Vuu Pu Yi (8 years) Tijger Tsou Pu Yi (15 years) Wu Tao Pu Chieh (adult) Fan Guang WenHsiu WoJun Mei Ar Mo Jade Go Tzu Hsi Lisa Lu Excellent; Very Good; Good; Fair; -tr Poor Rated PG-13, this film contains a few breast-feeding scenes, some more seemly than others, a bit of suggestive rollings about by a threesome beneath sheer silk sheets and MP r7 DININ Fri. Lunch Chefs Special of Food and Entertainment Surf Turf $1Q95 Winter romance at Chester at lie Jain B. Parmrtn Horn We invite you to join us for a wonderful Valentine's Day Dinner or spend the Weekend luxuriating in the Warmth of our Country Inn Overnight accommodations $40.00 per person double occupancy Our Gourmet Valentines Day Dinner A 7 ounce Sirloin Steak, Baked Stuffed Shrimp, Baked Bay Scallops, Potato, salad and rolls. Broiled Fillet of Scrod $450 potato, wet-table.

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