The Last Emperor 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 422
1987 / Color / 2:35 widescreen + 2:1 widescreen / 163 + 218 min. / L’ultimo imperatore / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date August 13, 2024 / 59.95
Starring: John Lone, Joan Chen, Peter O’Toole, Ruocheng Ying, Victor Wong, Dennis Dun, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Maggie Han, Ric Young, Vivian Wu.
Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro
Production Designer: Ferdinando Scarfiotti
Art Directors: Maria-Teresa Barbasso, Gianni Giovagnoni, Gianni Silvestri
Film Editors: Gabriella Cristiani, Anthony Sloman
Costume Design: James Acheson
Original Music: David Byrne, Ryuchi Sakamoto, Cong Su
Screenplay by Mark Peploe, Bernardo Bertolucci, Enzo Ungari from an autobiography by Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi
Produced by Jeremy Thomas
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

1987’s The Last Emperor is the crowning achievement of the U.S. / U.K. company Hemdale Pictures. It was the international production of the decade, with Italian, American, English, Japanese and Chinese working together; Columbia Pictures distributed. It did well domestically and abroad, even without Hollywood stars. Not everyone has seen the picture, but most of us recognize Bernardo Bertolucci’s bravura key image: a regally-dressed toddler runs through some cloth curtains, to reveal an enormous assembly of soldiers in a courtyard of The Forbidden City.

Talk about pleasing everybody — the movie swept the Academy Awards, with nine nominations and nine wins. Did you know that David Byrne was an Oscar winner?

 

Criterion’s previous Blu-ray is now 10 years old. This new 4K Ultra HD encoding brings back the expanded Italian television cut, which adds almost a full hour to the running time. And the new 4K disc also restores the film’s full widescreen dimensions, an issue explained in the presentation evaluation section below.

Based on a book by the deposed monarch himself, The Last Emperor is a nearly perfect balance of sweeping destinies and intimate lives. The film covers sixty years of Chinese history familiar to few westerners: the world of the boy emperor is as much an alternate universe as that of Tolkien or Frank Herbert. Bertolucci filmed in English, Chinese and Japanese in Peiping’s actual Forbidden City.

 

1949. The ex- puppet leader of Manchukuo during the Japanese occupation, former Emperor Pu Yi (John Lone) is delivered to the Chinese Communists for re-education by a stern prison warden (Ruocheng Ying). Thus begins an extended flashback of Pu Yi’s life starting in 1908. As the Dowager Empress nears death, tiny Pu Yi (played at different ages by four actors) is forcibly taken from his parents to become the pampered head of the Ching (Qing) Dynasty. Although waited on by an army of servants, Pu Yi cannot leave the Forbidden City. Only years later does he discover that China has become a republic, and that his royal compound is also a ‘privileged prison.’

As the civil wars of the 1920s rage outside the walls, English tutor Reginald Johnson (Peter O’Toole) explains to Pu Yi that the dynasty has been retained for symbolic purposes, and that his thousands of servants hold him prisoner to provide them with jobs and income. Pu Yi marries a pre-chosen bride, Wan Jung (Joan Chen). When a new warlord expels the royals, Pu Yi flees with Wan Jung to Tiensien, where they take the names Henry and Elizabeth and live frivolously in nightclubs. The Japanese invade, conquer and annex a large part of the divided country.

Spurred on by his Japanese ‘friend’ Amakasu (Ryuichi Sakamoto), Henry cannot resist Japan’s invitation to become the new Emperor of Manchukuo, and reclaim his destiny. Henry’s Japanese installers limit his role to ceremonial duties. Playgirl/friend Eastern Jewel (Maggie Han) hooks Elizabeth on opium so she can be held hostage. Amakasu has the royal couple’s baby murdered at birth to eliminate a potential heir. When the Russians overrun Manchukuo, Henry is captured attempting to escape.

 

A visual eye-opener, a feast for the senses.
The Last Emperor’s world-class cinematographer Vittorio Storaro tells the sprawling story of Pu Yi with color. It opens with Pu Yi’s suicide attempt in a cold, dull train station in Red China. His red blood cues a flashback to the end of the Ching Dynasty, loosing a riot of color and textures onto the screen. Spoiled little Pu Yi romps among endless ranks of guards and servants dressed in fantastic ritual costumes. Mostly kept from his real family, he’s pampered by wet nurses and kept ignorant of his position as a bird (or a cricket) in a gilded cage.

At every step, strong women are in control of Pu Yi’s life. A gaggle of aunts chooses his bride. Pu Yi’s wedding night is an exotic fantasy that seems to be happening in a dream. Wan Jung gives her new husband a taste of sexual delights and then backs off: “He’s very young, but he’ll grow up,” she laughs.

Eye-popping visuals and exotic designs abound in the early sections of the story. We see how the baby Pu Yi is fed, entertained and attended. As if trapped in a time warp, the Forbidden City remains in a past century while the China outside its walls undergoes violent political upheavals. The growing Pu Yi develops a distanced sympathy for democratic values, yet never questions his right to rule. Considering the hardships and suffering outside the walls, it’s obvious that Pu Yi’s royal lifestyle is a social outrage. When a warlord’s troops invade the Forbidden City, Pu Yi and his court are enjoying a game of tennis, with teacher Johnson serving as referee.

The film’s flashback structure reveals Pu Yi as a pampered prisoner with little or no control over his destiny, even when he and Wan Jung flee to Tiensien. As ‘Henry and Elizabeth’ they spend a summer or two pretending to be Hollywood stars, adopting western dress, music and customs. But the Japanese diplomatic / spy organization watches closely, grooming them to become puppet monarchs. Amakasu and Eastern Jewel have no difficulty getting Henry to take the bait, despite Elizabeth’s pleas that they go to England instead. Installed in a meaningless office, Henry can only watch as his captors despoil his country, murder his child and reduce Elizabeth to a psychotic state.

The ex-emperor’s fortunes become an absurd tragedy, when his revolutionary captors force him into a harsh re-education program. The middle-aged Pu Yi is incarcerated with several of his former servants, who continue to indulge his lies about being kidnapped by the Japanese to serve as the Emperor of Manchukuo.

Screenwriter Mark Peploe documents six decades of pageantry with a pragmatic view of history, presenting exotic cuatoms and unfamiliar history with sparkling clarity. Emperor Pu Yi was preserved through gigantic political convulsions in which millions of his countrymen perished — in civil wars, by invading Japanese and by the harsh policies of the Reds. Although Bertolucci acknowledges all of this, he doesn’t condemn Red China out of hand. The Cultural Revolution is reduced to a parade of hooligans while Henry’s forced incarceration is almost seen as a good thing. Less debatable is the film’s portrait of the Japanese invaders. How many films depict the medical murder of a baby, as the logical outcome of a political power play?

The acting is uniformly good, with John Lone outstanding as the unwise Emperor. A graduate of the Peking Opera, Lone studied in Pasadena and was in a theater group with the actor Mako; the casting directors for The Last Emperor saw him in Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon. Peter O’Toole is properly starched as the English tutor and actor-music composer Ryuchi Sakamoto is a cool menace as the one-armed Amakasu. Joan Chen is heartbreaking as the Emperor’s faithful wife, and Maggie Han suitably malevolent as the China-hating adventuress Eastern Jewel.

 

Hey, we’re being treated like an adult audience.
Seen afresh, The Last Emperor impresses by not hyping its own spectacle. It puts us into an entire new experience through the depth of its setting, not its scale… whether in the Peiping compound with the giant walls or the streets and clubs of Tiensien, Bertolucci and Storaro make us believe that vast historical changes are happening all around. Before this show, Western movies’ image of Chinese history was restricted to the hollow epic  55 Days at Peking, which sees Chinese politics as an inconvenience for European interests. Bertolucci’s aborbing, fascinating film never feels dumbed-down. It couldn’t have been conceived in an old-school studio environment, that’s for sure.

 

---

The Criterion Collection’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of  The Last Emperor jumps out at us in its new digital restoration. Compared to Criterion’s 2009 Blu-ray release, the 4K looks immediately better, with brighter colors, a richer contrast and of course, much more detail. The new set has one 4K Ultra HD disc, and two standard Blu-rays with two copies of the features and the extras.

We didn’t cover a 2014 re-do of the title, but are fairly certain that it didn’t contain the film’s 218-minute TV cut. Presented only in HD, the longer TV cut is an older encoding that cannot compare with the theatrical version, but viewers who love the show won’t mind. Bertolucci considered the theatrical version to be his movie, and the extended TV version just an addendum. It was last seen on Criterion’s first DVD release, in 2008.

 

Years after the release of The Last Emperor, Vittorio Storaro proposed that movie aspect ratios for both TV and film be standardized at 2:1. It’s a halfway sensible format idea that he called  Univisium. The wrinkle was that, when he had the leverage on video presentations, Storaro would re-format his own 2:35 anamoprhic films down to 2.1, something seen in many releases of  Apocalypse Now. From what I can see now, this may be the first time that The Last Emperor has been released in its full 2:35 width on video. (I’ll prepare for a correction on that.) The previous Criterion discs all appear to have carried a 2:1 AR.

For extras, Criterion repeats its impressive lineup from earlier Blu-rays. A commentary with Bertolucci, producer Jeremy Thomas, screenwriter Peploe and actor-composer Sakamoto is a marathon listen. Long-form docus and galleries include input from the director, cinematographer and the designers that fabricated a lost Chinese world in record time, with most interiors filmed on Italian sound stages. Filming on-set must have been a wild multi-lingual experience. The main making-of docu shows amusing footage of Bertolucci directing an army of extras on the forecourt of the Forbidden City. Assistants chatter in Italian while assistant directors relay instructions in Chinese. In the middle of this bedlam, other assistants attempt to corral the 3 year-old tyke playing Pu Yi.

Other featurettes from Italy and England document Bertolucci’s massive production, while historian Ian Buruma provides an annotated video essay explaining 20th Century Chinese history. David Byrne appears in an interesting interview-doc about his contribution to the soundtrack. The program book contains an essay by David Thompson. Continuing as Criterion’s Blu-ray producer is Kim Hendrickson.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

---

The Last Emperor – 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary with Bernardo Bertolucci, Jeremy Thomas, Mark Peploe, and Ryuichi Sakamoto
218-minute television version
The film The Italian Traveler, Bernardo Bertolucci by Fernand Moszkowicz
Footage taken by Bertolucci while on preproduction in China
Two separate making-of documentaries
Interview program featuring Vittorio Storaro, editor Gabriella Cristiani, costume designer James Acheson, and art director Gianni Silvestri
Archival interview with Bertolucci
Interviews with composer David Byrne and cultural historian Ian Buruma
Trailer
40-page insert booklet with essays by David Thomson and Fabien S. Gerard, a reminiscence by Bertolucci, and interviews with Ferdinando Scarfiotti and actor Ying Ruocheng.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD disc and two Blu-ray discs with booklet in keep case
Reviewed: August 1, 2024
(7170empe)

Visit CineSavant’s Main Column Page
Glenn Erickson answers most reader mail: cinesavant@gmail.com

Text © Copyright 2024 Glenn Erickson