EXCUSE me for being so bold, but isn't The Last Emperor (Pearl, 1.30am) on at the wrong time? Here is a film that has everything (good performances from John Lone and Joan Chen, no less), yet it is being shown when only those who eat coffee granules for dinner will be able to watch.
Lone, brought up in Hong Kong by foster parents, is wholly credible as the emperor, Pu Yi, as an adult. Wu Tao, who plays the emperor as an adolescent, is every bit his equal. Both convey his innocence, ignorance and veiled sadistic streak.
Shanghai girl Chen shows for once what she is capable of, playing both a radiant teenage bride and a rotting opium addict.
Caught in the middle is Peter O' Toole as Reginald Johnson, tutor for the emperor.
The Last Emperor is fascinating, with eye-popping visuals that will have the life squeezed out of them on the small screen. Its fault, if it has one, is that it could have been more red-blooded. The pageantry is spectacular, but it is also passive, filmed not for theatrical grandeur, but rather in the style of an airline advertisement.
The film marked Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci's return to the screen after a six-year absence. He tells, grandly, the story of Pu Yi, crowned emperor of China in 1908 at the age of three. By the end of his life he was quietly working as a gardener at Beijing's botanical gardens. In between he was made Japan's puppet emperor, deposed and imprisoned and then, in 1959, released into the world to fend for himself after a lifetime spent closeted in the Forbidden City.
The Last Emperor won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Cinematography (Vittorio Storaro). It was pre-dated by a Hong Kong film that told the same story, based on Pu Yi's autobiography.
