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Remolding an Emperor: Bertolucci's Beautiful Party-Line Epic
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14498 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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3 / 1988 |
557 Words |
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J. Perceval
J. Perceval writes on the arts from New York. |
The Last Emperor, an extraordinarily handsome film to see, is singularly instructive about how a government can shape audience attitudes around the world by investing money and facilitating production of a major motion picture.
Bernardo Bertolucci's last successful film, Last Tango in Paris, dates back a good fifteen years. The Italian director has more recently been peddling projects around in the hope of finding a taker anywhere in the world. Like a number of other Western directors, he yearned to film André Malraux's celebrated novel Man's Fate, so he proposed a coproduction with the People's Republic of China.
He had also read the "autobiography" of the onetime emperor of China, From Emperor to Citizen. It took the Chinese less than a month to make a basic deal to do the emperor's story. As for Malraux's novel, they first claimed they didn't know the book, that there was no translation. Finally, according to an interview with Bertolucci in Film Comment, they admitted that the material was still too touchy. They viewed the book as a defeat of communism. Bertolucci tried to explain that all workers in the West fell in love with Chinese communism because the book gave such a romantic picture of the revolution. The Chinese smiled politely at Bertolucci and said they really thought he should make The Last Emperor.
High Profile Sought
The Chinese wanted hard currency, a prestigious director, and the high international profile such a film would give them. They also found it attractive that Bertolucci was politically correct. Indeed, in the
... (1993 of 3314 Characters)
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