The Last Emperor - Director's Cut

Starring:John Lone, Joan Chen, Peter O'Toole, Ruocheng Ying, Victor Wong (III), Dennis Dun, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Maggie Han, Ric Young, Vivian Wu, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Jade Go, Fumihiko Ikeda, Richard Vuu, Tsou Tijger, Tao Wu, Guang Fan, Henry Kyi, Alvin Riley III, Lisa Lu
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Studio: Live / Artisan
Product Type: DVD

Editorial Review:
Amazon.com essential video
Everything that was good about the 163-minute theatrical release of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor in 1987 is even better in this new 218-minute director's cut. By contrast, much that was peculiarly distant and lifeless the first time around isn't really better or worse in this edition. Conclusion: the net gains are considerable if you invest time to appreciate Bertolucci's full feeling for the odd story of Pu Yi, China's final monarch. You remember the saga: taken from his mother at the age of three, Pu Yi is brought into the enclosed walls of the Forbidden City to replace the real emperor. There he becomes a pampered prisoner and hollow symbol of an older monarchy that has since given way to a ruthless, 20th century republic. With his pining loyalists beheaded or kept at bay by armed soldiers outside the City's walls, Pu Yi is tutored by an English gentleman (Peter O'Toole) and wed to a kindred spirit (Joan Chen). Eventually cast from his gated paradise, Pu Yi (wonderfully portrayed in adulthood by John Lone) becomes, by turns, a playboy, a dupe to the Japanese, and a victim of China's cultural reforms and re-education programs. This longer cut largely top-loads the film with greater reason to feel compassion for the emperor, with his often wordless sense-adventure in the mysteries that could only be known to one little boy plunged into indecipherable alien decorum, robbed of self-determination and common sense by his infinite privilege. Added scenes (including some in the political rehabilitation camp where Pu Yi is held for a decade) fill out not so much added facts as density of experience. This improved The Last Emperor is richer in soul and a pronounced sense of Bertolucci actually directing this film in the most personal and profound sense. --Tom Keogh

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor : Director's Cut [Import, All-region] (Dvd)
Average customer rating:
Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor : Director's Cut [Import, All-region] (Dvd)
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Manufacturer: Dawoori
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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Product Features:

Beautifully enhanced import from Korea made for dvd players in the USA/Canada/Korea (NTSC, All-Region).

A stunning milestone in the history of cinema, this is director Bernardo Bertolucci's original director's cut, presented for the first time on video, the way it was meant to be seen, including an enhanced original English soundtrack (optional subtitles in English and Korean)

Academy Award Winner (1987): Best Picture ~ Best Director ~ Best Cinematography ~ Best Art Direction/Set Decoration ~ Best Costume Design ~ Best Music, Original Score ~ Best Sound ~ Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium

ASIN: B000NSQ13O

Product Description

A stunning milestone in the history of cinema, this is director Bernardo Bertolucci's original director's cut, presented for the first time on video, the way it was meant to be seen. John Lone stars as Pu Yi, emperor of China, who comes from a long history of a tradition that is irreversibly altered by two world wars and fierce political upheaval. Guided by his English mentor, Pu Yi is forced to leave the lavish, protective walls of his kingdom and somehow find the strength to build a new life in a strange world he has always longed to explored, but has never really known.

Average customer rating:

Long but no "Titanic."
Entertaining but probably more fiction than fact
Fropm Sun Yat Sen to Mao Zedong
A good film with some key weaknesses
A modern classic tragedy

The Last Emperor - Director's Cut
Starring: John Lone , Joan Chen , Peter O'Toole , Ruocheng Ying , and Victor Wong (III)
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Manufacturer: Live / Artisan
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

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Empire of the Sun
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ASIN: 6305261032
Release Date: 1999-02-23

Amazon.com essential video

Everything that was good about the 163-minute theatrical release of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor in 1987 is even better in this new 218-minute director's cut. By contrast, much that was peculiarly distant and lifeless the first time around isn't really better or worse in this edition. Conclusion: the net gains are considerable if you invest time to appreciate Bertolucci's full feeling for the odd story of Pu Yi, China's final monarch. You remember the saga: taken from his mother at the age of three, Pu Yi is brought into the enclosed walls of the Forbidden City to replace the real emperor. There he becomes a pampered prisoner and hollow symbol of an older monarchy that has since given way to a ruthless, 20th century republic. With his pining loyalists beheaded or kept at bay by armed soldiers outside the City's walls, Pu Yi is tutored by an English gentleman (Peter O'Toole) and wed to a kindred spirit (Joan Chen). Eventually cast from his gated paradise, Pu Yi (wonderfully portrayed in adulthood by John Lone) becomes, by turns, a playboy, a dupe to the Japanese, and a victim of China's cultural reforms and re-education programs. This longer cut largely top-loads the film with greater reason to feel compassion for the emperor, with his often wordless sense-adventure in the mysteries that could only be known to one little boy plunged into indecipherable alien decorum, robbed of self-determination and common sense by his infinite privilege. Added scenes (including some in the political rehabilitation camp where Pu Yi is held for a decade) fill out not so much added facts as density of experience. This improved The Last Emperor is richer in soul and a pronounced sense of Bertolucci actually directing this film in the most personal and profound sense. --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews:

Long but no "Titanic.".......2007-05-12

Visually spectacular and perhaps necessarily static, "The Last Emperor" limits the options of all but the most imaginative of directors. I'm not a fan of long movies (especially if that means another "Titanic"), but Bertolucci's visual compositions in conjunction with authentic period feel and some good acting made the film both bearable and enjoyable. What's missing is an authentic sense of the tragic (how can such an unfortunate, shielded, quarantined victim of circumstance be convincingly shown to have a "fatal flaw"?) and, more regrettably, a moving, memorable sense of the elegiac. The material the director is working with would seem to allow multiple possibilities for conveying a profound sense of loss, of inexorable change occurring within the context of painful memories which nevertheless serve as consolations, filling the void produced by the tyranny of time and change. But Bertolucci seems so averse to the melodramatic mode (essential to effective elegy) and attached to the notion of spectacle that the movie simply fails to connect as personally as it should.

Although "The Last Emperor" took the Best Picture award, it was released during the same year as "Empire of the Sun," arguably Spielberg's most complex, impressive cinematic achievement. A movie set in Shanghai, it offers more insight into the Western and Japanese occupation of China than into the Chinese themselves. Yet it resonates with life and energy, violence and destruction, death and loss--seen through the eyes of another Spielberg innocent--as Bertolucci's "Important Great Film" does not. It's cinematic spectacle that goes beyond artful travelog or illustrated history, providing a perspective that is at once universal and intimately personal. In my mind, Spielberg, perhaps for the one and only time, got robbed by the Academy.

Entertaining but probably more fiction than fact.......2007-04-07

I found this film, yes....long! I was so bored and depressed by the first 45 minutes that I stopped watching it. However, for some reason I tried again the next night. Fortunately that's when Peter O'Toole entered and things perked up considerably. After that I was hooked and sat still without squirming or snacking for the remainder...almost three hours.

Visually, the film is amazing, as you can expect from Bertolucci. The shots inside the Forbidden City alone, make the it worth watching. As time passes the costumes and decors are equally interesting.

The actors are perfect. John Lone is terrific. He is so handsome and sympathetic that he makes you care deeply about a man, who probably wasn't really that nice. Joan Chen as the beautiful Empress is a perfect match. Peter O'Toole is always a delight to watch. The supporting actors are all wonderful, especially the man who played the Governor of the prison.

I found the comments of many of the readers instructive and interesting. My knowledge of this period of history is negligible so I am open to suggestions... It seems, from what several people have written that Bertolucci, a member of the Communist party, softsoaped the treatment that the prisoners endured, which casts grave doubts on the accuracy of the story. Several others have commented that the Emperor was gay while another person wrote that he was married five times. ??? So with the accuracy of the facts up in the air, I decided to just take the film on its own terms and enjoy it...seeing it almost as a work of fiction, "based on" some true characters. As such I can love it. I prefer to see the Emperor as a basically good man, innocent and with good intentions, who was a victim of his situation. Again John Lone is such a lovely person that I found it hard to see him as anything less, although the real Emperor might truly have been a creep.

The basic story is fascinating, and I, for one, to do not see it as tragic that he ended up as a gardener. He seemed to be happier in his last days than he ever had been...arranging the plants and smiling at his co-workers. He seemed to have found a state of peace and even joy that was truly lovely. The closing scene in the palace is charming, although I found his sudden "disappearance" inappropriately strange. (Also...I had to wonder how long that cricket had been in the box?)

For all its flaws, and I think there are plenty, the film is so rich that most people will certainly find a lot to appreciate and enjoy.

Fropm Sun Yat Sen to Mao Zedong.......2007-03-29

A very strange film about China. To look at the history of this country in the first seven decades of the 20th century through the exclusive eyes of the last emperor who lived locked up in the Forbidden City all his life till he was freed by the Japanese and marched to Manchuria to become the last emperor there is kind of debilitating and disappointing. Then he was captured by Mao Zedong's troops and was re-educated in some kind of rehabilitation camp and finished his life as a gardener. At the end of his life he saw the mounting pressure coming from the Red Guards and announcing the Cultural Revolution. The vision is both sorry and disappointed in a way. But does this film present a picture of this man, or of China, or of the world that is worth remembering? He is too capricious to be in anyway great or even remembered. He lost all his power when Sun Yat Sen arrived and yet he survived as some kind of a symbol that the Japanese used. He accepted to sell himself to the Japanese as this symbol precisely. But he more or less gracefully acknowledged the fact later on, though we will never know whether he agreed with the rehabilitation procedure or just suffered it and tolerated it out of surviving interest. Rather beautiful though if anything.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

A good film with some key weaknesses.......2007-02-05

I found the overall storyline of this movie to be compelling and interesting - it is just too long. The original theatrical version ran 160 minutes. This DVD cut runs 218 minutes. Unless the film is "Gone with the Wind", few people are going to sit through any movie that runs three and a half hours. This film is one of only three total Best Picture winners that won every one of the awards for which it was nominated, but strangely enough it received no nominations for acting. I found this odd, since I thought that one of the film's finer points were its performances.

In this film, Pu-Yi grows to a man who was deposed as the last emperor of China while still a child, and thus he wanders from country to country as a young man who is wealthy but without purpose. Thus, never really coming to terms with the fact that he is no longer king, he jumps at the chance to sell himself out as a puppet to the Japanese when they offer him the opportunity to rule at least part of China again. As Emperor of Manchukuo, Pu-Yi is blind to the barborous acts and experiments that the Japanese perform upon his subjects, blind to the fact that his wife has an affair with a servant to produce a royal heir, and most of all, blind to his role as puppet in the Japanese scheme for world domination. Not until the end of World War II does he seem to even have an inkling of what has been going on.

Now for the part of the movie to which I really object. Although it is compelling to see Pu-Yi slowly owe up to his responsibility for what happened in China during the Japanese occupation and come to terms with the fact that he is, after all, just a man like any other man, I strongly object to the Maoists as the good-guys in this quest for redemption. The Communist Chinese did the same type of reindoctrination on many other people - among them Christian missionaries, Buddhist monks, and believers in democracy and a free press - anyone who simply got in their way and needed their world view "readjusted". On top of that, how the Communists reindoctrinate people in this film is G-rated compared to what really went on in such camps. For details, consult the novel "1984". These points are completely whitewashed.

As for my rating, I subtract one star for the film being overly long, and another star for the portrayal of the Communist Chinese as the patient and kindly savers of lost souls. Without these two flaws, this would have pretty much been a perfect film. Thus I give it three total stars.

A modern classic tragedy.......2007-02-01

Ever since I first saw this film shortly after it first became available on VHS, it has been one of my favorite films of all time. Disregarding the technical comments by some of the reviewers, this film, in any format, is worth watching. I believe it is a classic tragedy in the Aristotelian sense--a rare treat these days. We witness the tragic fall of Pu Yi from sumptuous, sensuous magnificence to the squalor of a prison camp and finally a life as a simple gardener. The visual worlds collide in a clash of cultures and hubris. If I were still teaching dramatic theory I would require this film to be viewed alongside Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, and King Lear.

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