REVIEW

Bertolucci’s vision

of Chinese history

THE LAST EMPEROR. Starring John
Lone, Joan Chen and Peter O'Toole.
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. At local
theatres. :

History is filled with ironies. So when
Henry Pu Yidies during the Great Cultural
Revolution, a period of turmoil as intense as
that which ushered him onto China’s impe-
rial throne, we shouldn’t be surprised.

And when the last Lord of 10,000 Years
has to buy a ticket to take an unguided tour
of the Forbidden Palace where he once
commanded thousands, it seems only natu-
ral.

History also has its repeats. As a boy
emperor, Pu Yi is challenged by his younger
brother to prove he is the emperor of China.
As an old man in Mao Zedong’s China, he
is again challenged, by a boy of that age
whose family is appointed to guard the
palace grounds.

Anyone who has seen Bertolucci’s 1900,
and other films by the progressive Italian
director, will recognize these trademarks.
And they’ll likely also note the similarity
between the villain/victims of 1900, a film
about Italy’s trials, tribulations and class
struggle from the turn of the century, and
The Last Emperor, which covers much the
same period for China.

Bertolucci is a Marxist, anti-fascist film-
maker. But there is curious sympathy for Pu
Yi who, as the last member of the imperial
house, returned to royalty as the ruler of
Manchuria in collusion with the Japanese
during World War II.

There is also a admiration for pageantry,
with all its colours and grace, irrespective of
what it symbolizes. Whether it is thousands of
eunuchs. prostrate: in the Forbidden: Palace’s
sprawling” -courtyards® or ‘a’ contingent of
young Red Guards performing a choreo-
graphed political rite in a Beijing street, Berto-
lucci’s camera is awestruck.

Such a visual treat is The Last Emperor

that, in the hands of a less concerned direc-
tor, the panoramic vistas might have
drowned the story. But this is also an actor’s
movie, with moving portrayals by Chinese-
American actor John Lone as the tor-
mented Pu Yi, and Joan Chen as his tragic
wife, Wang Jung.

There is a sense of fatality in the story of
Pu Yi, who ascended the throne in 1908 at
the age of three. Informed that from that
point on, the child — who delights the
audience by flaunting pomp and ceremony
in his toddler’s innocence — has absolute
control over his circumstances, he can
scarcely be blamed for growing up expect-
ing that he must always rule and be served
by subordinates.

But that ingrained mode of thinking is
hidden, and in most matters, Pu Yi displays
a disdain for conventionality and develops a
reformer’s zeal as he matures. Realizing that
he is a virtual prisoner in the Forbidden
Palace after China becomes a republic, the
young emperor challenges convention by
cutting of his traditional pigtail and siding
with students who are rebelling against the
increasing corrupt government.

He also comes to realize that the 1,800
eunuchs who serve him have perpetuated
this archaic system to preserve their own
comfortable lifestyles. Knowing: also that
they are stealing imperial treasures he has
them expelled from the grounds.

Pu Yi’s modernization is complete when
he, the empress and the consort — the
emperor’s second wife, played by Wu Jun
Mei — are forced to leave the palace by
republican troops in the latest coup d’etat.
The former royal family become socialites
and party, while newscasts give details of the
civil war between Chiang Kai-Shek’s reac-
tionary Kuomintang and the Communists.

We learn the details of the emperor’s life
though flashbacks introduced during inter-
rogation sessions in a re-education prison.

a

JOHN LONE AS PU YI.

During the persistent questioning — which
is relentless, but not physically brutal — Pu
Yi abandons the lie that he was kidnapped
and forced to assume the Manchurian
throne, and admit that he was, at least
initially, a willing captive ruler of a puppet
government. :

The Last Emperor lets us know that there
could scarcely be a worse crime than play-
ing host to the imperialist armies of Japan,
who used Manchuria to stage bombing
raids on the rest of the country. Yet the
theme of the ruler as victim persists and
casts a sympathetic light on Pu Yi — most
movingly when he chases after a car bearing
away his wife and is prevented from leaving
the palace grounds by armed guards. It mir-
rors an earlier scene in which the boy
emperor, yearning to taste life, is also held
against his will within the walls of the For-
bidden Palace.

How are audiences unfamiliar with the
politics likely to view the Chinese revolu-
tion, as presented by Bertolucci?

While China’s socialist revolution is pres-
ented as a backdrop to Pu Yi’s life, it
increasingly comes to dominate it. The
initial view of the new order is not particu-
larly inspiring: a crowded, noisy railroad
station filled with prisoners and a grim pri-
son in which the captives undergo political
re-education.

But these things are the realities of life,
and in the end the prison does not produce
corpses or broken men, but citizens of the

.. an awe for pomp and pageantry.

new republic. Pu Yi lives the rest of his days
as a gardener and one who is at least
resigned, if not content, to be rid of the
trappings of his monarchical past.

Filmed mainly on location in China
— the actual Forbidden Palace is used
— and with the collaboration of a Chinese
screenwriter, The Last Emperor obviously
did not offend the sensibilities of the Chi-
nese government. So it is likely that the
critical presentation of Mao’s Cultural
Revolution, which in the film does not
spare, and indeed targets, dedicated vete-
rans of the revolution, accords with the
views of China’s leaders and thinkers today.

Some viewers might find irritating the
film’s method of presenting several devel-
opments in one scene: for instance, the
enforced departure of the young Pu Yi’s
wetnurse, a trauma compounded by the
discovery only minutes before that he is
emperor in name only. Such events would
normally be separated by some passage of
time, and why Bertolucci chooses to run
one after the other in a single time frame is
puzzling. a

Others may not understand the director's" -
defiance of reality, seen when a. cricket’

which the boy emperor received on his cor-
onation emerges from its container alive in
1967, the year of Pu Yi’s death. It may be
symbolism and it also could be Bertolucci’s
way of saying that although life and history
run by the laws of materialism, there is

always room for magic. = __ Dan Keeton

Gorbachev's Perestroika a best-seller

PERESTROIKA: NEW THINKING
FOR OUR COUNTRY AND THE
WHOLE WORLD. Mikhail Gorbachev.
Harper and Row Publishers, New York.
1987. Available at People’s Co-op
Books.

It hardly seems necessary to write a
book review to say that Mikhail Gorba-
chev’s new work, Perestroika, is ex-
tremely important and that everyone
who is interested in the process of change
now underway in the USSR ought to
read it. If there ever was a self-evident
proposition, that would be it.

Indeed, public perception is ahead of
all reviewers in this case. Two previous
books, both collections of Gorbachev's
speeches printed by western publishers,
have for some time been selling briskly in
Canadian bookstores. This is in rather
sharp contrast to the fate of previous
Soviet leader’s books, which I once saw
gathering dust in a warehouse, unsalable
at any price.

It seems to me that are two reasons
that so many people are buying and read-
ing Gorbachev in the west. One is peres-
troika itself, with which his name is so
intimately connected. Perestroika is a
phenomenon that commands attention
from well-wishers and enemies alike for
however it may turn out, world politics
will be forever altered by it.

But, the second reason is that the man
undeniably has a style and a gift for
communication. Although Perestroika is
written in that declamatory Soviet
fashion that so often irks western read-
ers, its essential honesty and force
repeatedly break through.

Moreover, Gorbachev has a way of
“anticipating objections,” recognizing if
not agreeing with western concerns and
speaking directly to the point whiclt is as
refreshing as it is rare in a politician. -

Gorbachev is a leader in power and
therefore his book does not, and cannot,
go beyond existing policy, or speculate,
or throw out juicy tidbits about personal-
ities and world affairs. What he does do,
however, is register his attitudes across
the spectrum of issues, and give usa clear
idea of the thinking that lies behind the
Soviet restructuring.

The most important contribution his
book may make to the present avid dis-
cussion about perestroika could be that it
clearly answers the question that so
many scholars, journalists, and politi-
cians in the west are at least pretending to
be asking: is Gorbachev just a new type

- of communist, or is he really going to
change the system (is he a closet capital-
ist, for example)?

Perestroika will put an end to this
somewhat loaded debate. Gorbachev
firmly situates the current restructuring
drive within the socialist tradition,merg-

10 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, FEBRUARY 10, 1988

ing Marxist-Leninist ideals with Soviet
experience.

Perestroika is, perhaps more than any-
thing else, a personal inquiry into the
expanding logic of socialism. The Soviet
experiment has achieved much and has
also tasted bitter failure, says Gorba-
chev, but it is a young and dynamic sys-
tem which is only beginning to explore its
potential. If socialism is strong, and has
been fundamentally successful, then why
does it need another revolution to inno-
vate itself?

“Historical analogy may be helpful in
answering this question,” replies Gorba-
chev. “Lenin once noted that in a coun-
try of the classical bourgeois revolution,

France, after its great revolution of

1789-93, it took another three revolu-
tions (1830, 1848 and 1871) to carry
through the aims. The same applies to
Britain where, after the Cromwellian
revolution of 1640, came the

‘glorious’ revolution of 1688-9 and then
the 1832 reform was necessary to finally
establish the new class, the bourgeoisie,
in power...”

It is with a similar sense of historical
perspective, and profound integrity, that
Gorbachev draws an absolutely essential
and long overdue line through Soviet
politics: the line between Bolshevism and
Stalinism. This implicit distinction un-
derlines every page of Perestroika. By
repeatedly turning to, and stressing the

- take for, as Gorbachev makes clear, one

works of Lenin, in particular his last
works, Gorbachev is not mimicking but
digging. It is Lenin, far removed in time
but near in spirit, who is Gorbachev’s
source and inspiration in seeking to
reconstruct socialism and refocus the
vision. (I might point out, parentheti-
cally, that those writings of Lenin upon
which so much attention is now riveted
are easily accessible and can be profitably
read by anyone who seeks deeper insight
into the current process. They include:
“On Co-Operation,” “Our Revolution,”
“Better Fewer But Better” and some -
others),

Canadian readers may gravitate to-
wards Gorbachev’s discussion of new
thinking in global affairs, hastening over
sometimes arcane descriptions of the
deep internal changes underway in the
Soviet Union today. This could be a mis-

is a direct outgrowth of the other. The
Soviet perestroika deserves to be watched
not only for its impact on international
politics, but also because it tells us a great
deal about the destiny of socialism in our
world.

Gorbachev himself describes the book
as “an invitation to a dialogue,” and that
is apt. It is a dialogue about survival, in
the first place, but also about the direc-
tions of human progress. -

— Fred Weir

Ghia #

a Meds Newside &. ‘Mis itis