An historical epic whose stupefying beauty is surpassed only by its stupefying dullness. The life of Pu Yi, emperor of China at age three and an average Communist citizen at his death, affords plenty of material for a movie; and Bernardo Bertolucci's stated fascination with "the metamorphosis of a man who, as the Chinese say, changes from a dragon to a normal person" sounds as alluring an angle as any. But the movie is not really about that. It is undoubtedly about, in the sense of around and in the vicinity of, the man's life as "a dragon," and specifically about the material splendors of his life as that, thrown at you with a showy vulgarity that (unlike, say, some of Visconti's nosings-about in the aristocracy) goes far beyond the needs of accurate reporting. Undoubtedly, too, the protagonist has stopped being a dragon and has become a normal person by movie's end. But the metamorphosis is missing. In some ways -- in scale, and in its two-and-three-quarter-hour length -- the movie is a throwback to the epics of the Sixties (albeit without the orchestral overture and the intermission and the souvenir program). But Bertolucci's commodious framework is much less filled, not in terms of material things, but in terms of justifying incident and action, than that of any Sixties epic. And the dialogue, by Bertolucci in collaboration with Mark Peploe, would not be out of place in comic-strip balloons. With John Lone and Peter O'Toole. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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