The Last Emperor (1987)

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor arrives with the confidence of a film that knows it will collect nine Academy Awards and feels no need to hurry. It follows Puyi from a frightened toddler summoned to the Forbidden City through abdication, exile, puppet emperorship, and finally a garden in Mao's China. The production secured the actual palace, nineteen thousand extras, and the cooperation of a government that had notes on the script. It declines to supply a moral. The film observes. It does not instruct.

The political material is present, and heavy. Puyi is held as a war criminal, interrogated, made to watch footage of Japanese atrocities, and slowly bent into agreement. The Cultural Revolution parades through the final act with dunce caps and sandwich boards. A viewer braced for a lesson about power, complicity, or empire will wait a long time. Bertolucci keeps the camera at a respectful distance and lets the century do the shouting. The film's inaccuracies, and there are several, flatter its protagonist as a man, not as a vessel for anything current.

On the matter of modern social consciousness, the ledger is empty. The cast is Chinese because the story is Chinese, a question of geography and history, not of casting initiative. Women appear as empresses and consorts and are granted interiority without being conscripted into an argument. There is no environmental sermon, no economic polemic, no body-diversity messaging, no neurodivergent arc, no reclaimed history in the contemporary sense. Even the re-education scenes, which could so easily become a lecture, remain a portrait of a specific bureaucratic cruelty. It is a large, patient, beautiful film about a man who lost everything twice.