Show Business: Love And Respect, Hollywood-Style

• Share

Give a man an Oscar, and he turns into Sally Field. He may be a European intellectual full of skeptical opinions about the cultural imperialism of American movies. His film may have been snubbed by several Hollywood studios and mishandled by the company that finally distributed it. But hand him a gold-plated statuette in front of a billion people, and he finds heroic resources of good feeling. Just ask Bernardo Bertolucci. "It's incredible," the Italian filmmaker, 47, geysered the day after his The Last Emperor swept the Oscar ceremony. "First it was one award, then two, three, four, five, six-seven-eight-nine! It went beyond the individuals who won. I realized it was the movie itself. The movie was loved!"

Were the Oscar voters telling The Last Emperor's director that they loved the movie, they really loved it? Surely there were waves of affection breaking over the winners of the acting prizes: Cher (Moonstruck), Michael Douglas (Wall Street), Sean Connery (The Untouchables) and Olympia Dukakis (Moonstruck). But The Last Emperor, with its stern, sumptuous sprawl, more likely earned a decorous, distanced respect in a slim year. The other nominees for Best Picture were three comedies and one high-tech yuppie horror movie -- not the Academy's favorite genres. By contrast, Bertolucci's true-life fable of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi, China's last monarch, had all the familiar Academy-epic goods. It rips turbulent drama from the back pages of a high school history book. It serves up an opulent visual sensibility amid exotic locales. And it concludes with a humanism that affirms both continuity and change for the family of man. Can't-miss stuff. Lawrence of Arabia with a Manchurian accent.

The burghers of Hollywood, however, were not initially impressed. Producer Jeremy Thomas had to raise his $23.8 million budget independently, while Bertolucci secured precedent-setting rights to film in the Forbidden City. Only after shooting did David Puttnam, head of Columbia Pictures, agree to distribute Emperor in America. Before the film was released, Puttnam resigned under fire, and the new administration has treated its gift horse like a Trojan horse. Even now the film is playing in only 882 North American theaters.

By Hollywood standards, The Last Emperor is a supremely daring film. Instead of following the normal emotional trajectory of movie epics -- struggle, triumph, despair, reconciliation -- Bertolucci's film runs a slalom course of disillusionment. In worldly or heroic terms, Pu Yi attains nothing. He loses his power, then his title, then his freedom. Nor is Pu Yi personally attractive; he can be both toady and bully. "He's not a sympathetic character," says Screenwriter Mark Peploe, who is Bertolucci's brother-in- law. "I resisted even trying to understand him when I wrote the script." But any alert viewer can understand the wrenching dislocation of a child who is virtually kidnaped into royalty, raised by thieving eunuchs and condemned to a sham monarchy in a lifelong series of ever smaller Chinese puzzle boxes. The Last Emperor is a metaphor for the prisons we are born in and the prisons we create for ourselves.