Bernardo Bertolucci spent 25 million dollars making The Last Emperor and won nine Oscars for his effort, but historians of China, with few exceptions, refuse to take this lavish production very seriously. Among other things, they object to the invention of some episodes, such as Pu Yi's attempted suicide in 1950, and the inexplicable omission of genuinely important moments in his life, such as his five-year imprisonment in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s.

But a more serious difficulty is that the story is based primarily on the notoriously unreliable “official autobiography” published by the Chinese government in 1963 after Pu Yi had undergone nine years of “reform through labor” in a Chinese prison for “war criminals.” The film, like the autobiography, views the last emperor's life through Communist party-approved lenses. Of course, Bertolucci had no choice, since some form of government script control is normally a precondition for filming in China. In fact, Li Wenda, the man who “helped” Pu Yi write his autobiography nearly thirty years ago, was brought in to advise Bertolucci. The Last Emperor demonstrates just how risky it is to base visual accounts of history on a written text, especially when the text is seriously flawed.

But why not give Bertolucci the benefit of the doubt by treating The Last Emperor as a work of fiction and ignoring the sort of embellishments one expects to find in commercial films? As a fictional account, does it offer any interesting insights on the social, economic, cultural, and political problems of China in the twentieth century? The answer, unfortunately, is no. Bertolucci, unlike the producers of Reds (1982), does virtually nothing to locate the story of an individual life in a meaningful historical context. The film is trapped by its subject, a powerless and pathetic pawn whose life is irrelevant to the central issues of his time. The problems that preoccupy historians—the 1911 revolution, political and social currents, the May Fourth Movement, the Nationalist-Communist alliance, the Nanjing decade, the rise of the Communist party during World War II, and the Cultural Revolution—are never introduced in a coherent way. The audience, like the emperor himself, is kept in the dark about events in China. There is only interminable chaos and confusion.

The Last Emperor is biographical in the narrowest sense of the word. It is an account of Pu Yi's lifelong imprisonment that manages to imprison the audience by never allowing the viewer to see the complex and dynamic Chinese world that lies beyond the Forbidden City in Beijing, the imperial residence in Changchun and the labor camp in Fushun. The contribution of the film is limited to a portrait of an emperor who has no realm and is manipulated first by aging imperial consorts and corrupt eunuchs, and later by Japanese militarists and Communist revolutionaries.

Bertolucci had a chance to break new ground on the truly interesting issue of the relationship between Pu Yi and the Japanese in the 1925–1945 period, but his treatment of the Japanese amounts to little more than a recasting of the crude, one-dimensional caricatures of Japan that have appeared time and again in Chinese films since 1937. The subject of Communist labor camps offered Bertolucci another opportunity to make a contribution, but his representation shows conditions that are far better than the ones that existed in the network of hellish labor camps that were so busy in the 1950s.

Although The Last Emperor has virtually nothing significant to say about the major issues in modern Chinese history, the first portion of the film, which begins when the three-year-old monarch enters the Imperial Palace in 1908 and ends when he is forced out in 1924, twelve years after his abdication, is both visually stunning and of considerable ethnographic interest. Bertolucci did what Chinese filmmakers have never been allowed to do, that is, go inside the Forbidden City to re-create in meticulous detail richly textured images of court life. These include breathtaking treatments of the arrival of the three-year-old emperor-designate in November 1908, his coronation in December 1908 and his marriage to Wan Rong in 1922. Perhaps more interestingly, they also portray things such as the emotional relationship between the boy emperor and the wet nurse who breastfeeds him until he is ten years old, and Pu Yi's use of Republican troops to expel 1,500 eunuchs (who depart with testicles in hand) from the Forbidden City in 1923.

Unfortunately, non-specialist viewers, denied any meaningful information about the historical backdrop, are likely to be attracted to these gorgeous re-creations for the wrong reasons. By electing not to introduce relevant historical themes, Bertolucci is reduced to cataloging fascinating “oriental exotica.” In short, his film won nine Oscars not because it broke new cinematic ground but because it departs in no significant way from a familiar Hollywood formula that insists on treating Asia as mysterious and unfathomable.