‘Is it true I can do anything I like?’ The child's remark is half innocent, half aware of the corruptions of power—and perhaps the key to Bertolucci's interpretation of the life of the last Emperor of China. Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi was, literally, His Majesty the Child. Installed on the Dragon Throne in 1908 at the age of three, festooned by stepmothers, tutors, courtiers and an army of eunuchs (1,600 of them), the child emperor was omnipotent. In his confessional autobiography written—or ghosted—during the period of his rehabilitation by the Chinese Communist Party, Pu Yi describes a meal that was laid out for him each day in the Mind Nurture Palace. From Duck of Triple Delight to Ancestor Meat Soup, the menu occupies a page of text. But the food was not for eating: it was pure display, a hieratic ritual of the Ch'ing dynasty court.

This all-powerful monarch, Son of Heaven and Lord of Ten Thousand Years, absolute ruler of an empire which stretched from Siberia to Burma, ended his days as a gardener in the Beijing Botanical Gardens. Was this a fall from grace, of spectacular dimensions? Not according to the Chinese, who congratulated Bertolucci on the screenplay (by Mark Peploe and the director, with earlier collaboration by the late Enzo Ungari) for its account of Pu Yi's transformation from imperial dragon to model citizen of the People's Republic, just one face among the hundreds of cyclists waiting at a traffic light on their way to work.

Bertolucci himself sees The Last Emperor (Columbia) as a journey from darkness into light, where his previous films travelled from light to dark. So the film begins, immediately interposing its moral and political thematic, with that point in Pu Yi's life when he tried to end it, by cutting his wrists in a railway station washroom on the Sino-Soviet border. In one of those coded compositions that have become a characterising feature of Bertolucci's cinema, the camera closes on the red circle of blood. Pu Yi is saved, though, as he is to be ‘saved’ by ten years of political re-education.

It is this journey into light which determines the film's structure, and is reflected in the gradations of its style. As Pu Yi responds to his interrogator and to his mentor, the prison governor (played, with a nice irony, by China's Deputy Minister of Culture, Ying Ruocheng), we see a version of his extraordinary life. First, and at length, the oppressive pageant of the Manchu court. Great blocks of spectacle fill the screen as Vittorio Storaro's camera sweeps and swoops through the vast courtyards and the interior maze of the Forbidden City, or describes slow parabolas round the massed ranks of kowtowing courtiers. This is breathtaking cinema, its calculated grandiosity recalling, on a magnified scale, the geometrical architecture of The Conformist. As one bravura sequence follows another (crowds scurrying to turn their faces to the walls as their child emperor is carried through the streets; the venerable Empress Dowager propped up on her mammoth bed with a Pekinese dog at her feet), the film runs the risk, which it does not entirely avoid, of offering a surfeit of spectacle. But this is not of course mere spectacle, which for all its pomp and circumstance would soon become a visual tautology. What we have here is that familiar Bertolucci strategy of playing one perception against another, as Pu Yi's recollections are mediated by the director's formal commentary on them, and by the spectator's own shifting interpretation of these scenes.

Typically, in this first section, the camera will describe a line across a crowded scene before moving slightly off the horizontal. The angularity alerts us to a point of view, and as a formal device it is supported by the elaborate colour coding of Storaro's lighting. The early sequences in the palace are suffused in yellow and red (the yellow tiles evidently reminding Bertolucci of his birthplace, Parma). Cocooned in ritual, shielded from the forbidden world outside the Forbidden City, Pu Yi is a prisoner of this imperial pageant. The sense of confinement is nowhere better conveyed than in a vast open space as the boy, in extreme long shot, despairingly calls after his wet nurse when she is dismissed from the palace.

Even when the dynasty is forced to abdicate after the 1911 revolution, life within the Forbidden City continues as, in Pu Yi's words, ‘a theatre without an audience.’ A little light is let in with the arrival of a foreign tutor (Peter O'Toole, with a faltering Scottish accent but otherwise striking an agreeable balance between awe and canniness), who introduces his charge to some of the mysteries of the Occident. As Pu Yi emerges into adulthood, he also emerges tentatively out of the shadows cast by the towering walls of his entrapment. But not beyond them: confronted by a barred gate as he tries to leave the city, he hurls his pet white mouse against it.

Pu Yi as victim, then? We should know by now that Bertolucci could not entertain so reductive a view, and there have already been qualifying indications. The omnipotent child is not averse to the seductions of power. When even a cricket crawls from its box to kowtow to him, it is nothing for him to prove his power as emperor by obliging a Chinese tutor to drink green ink. The shade of Freud is never far from Bertolucci's films. It haunted The Conformist, and it is that film's dark obsessions which the central section of The Last Emperor most recalls.

Denied real power as a child by a surfeit of its trappings, Pu Yi as an adult (the excellent John Lone) is traduced into believing that he has found it when he is installed by the Japanese as puppet emperor of their client state of Manchukuo. With a retinue of camels and black limousines, the emperor's second coronation is enacted on a dusty plain in a replica of the Forbidden City's Temple of Heaven—and in the middle of nowhere. The power is illusory, an illusion reflected by the lighting and the decor throughout this part of the film. Cold greys and browns predominate, as Pu Yi's strings are pulled by the Japanese and his wife (Joan Chen) is seduced into opium addiction by a sinister temptress called Eastern Jewel (Maggie Han).

This agent of the dark, first seen in a startling brown leather flying suit, remains a mysterious figure. The focus hereabouts is blurred, as though the film were itself being seduced by its portrait of decadence: there is more than a touch of 1930s Hollywood Chinoiserie in the steamy shadows of the opium-smoking scenes. A similar sense of haste is evident in the relatively brief account of Pu Yi's final emergence into the light, with the result that we are not quite persuaded, as Bertolucci clearly means to persuade us, of the emperor's absorption into the collective consciousness of the Chinese people. The Cultural Revolution, presented as a piece of street theatre performed by fresh-faced students, and unpersuasively bringing on Pu Yi from the wings to protest about the prison governor's appearance in a parade of dunce-capped revisionists, looks like a Westerner's view of these somewhat less anodyne events. And the final sequence, as the gardener Pu Yi revisits the Forbidden City and ‘discovers’ his childhood cricket behind the throne to prove to a red-neckerchiefed boy that he was indeed the emperor, is astonishingly sentimental. The full-circle schematism of this scene is an indication of the film's ultimate failure to resolve its own contradictions. Not for the first time in Bertolucci's work, the parts do not quite build into a whole, even when that whole is built on shifting perspectives. But they are magnificent.