Free Fall Through History THE LAST EMPEROR

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

He was stripped of all effective power at the age of six, before he fully understood what he was losing. Thereafter, he was permitted sovereignty only over what he could literally survey from the Dragon Throne of Beijing's Forbidden City: some 20 palaces, countless courtyards and a small army of thieving eunuchs. Even that dubious privilege was taken from him in 1924, when at 18 he was booted into exile. Later, the Japanese made him the puppet ruler of conquered Manchuria. Still later, the People's Republic of China made him a prisoner, charged with war crimes and ripe for nearly a decade of ideological "remolding." Finally Pu Yi, the last Emperor of China, was rewarded with the one title he could gracefully live up to: citizen. He spent the remainder of his days working as a gardener, writing his memoirs and claiming to have found happiness at last.

Maybe he did. True, as an infant Pu Yi was chosen to bestride the history books, yet his destiny was to be that of a man endlessly free-falling through most of this century's horror. But it must have been a relief for him to come to rest as a footnote, a curiosity, at the bottom of a rarely opened page. Perhaps having accepted this fate, he would have savored another irony: that he would earn posthumous eminence as the focus of a big-budget movie -- one conceived and financed by Westerners. Once again Pu Yi is the shadow king manipulated by outsiders. And what beautiful shadows they make!

In the Emperor's day, Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris) would surely not have obtained a passport to visit the Forbidden City, let alone explore its ruler's forbidden soul. Last year, though, the director received free range of both from Pu Yi's successors, who regard his final, harmless-dodderer incarnation as an exemplary triumph for their system. The result is a film epic in length (almost three hours), vision (the reimagining of a lost and exotic world) and imagery (formal and glowing). Yet at its center is an anti-epic figure, inarticulate and victimized. The movie must therefore depend for its emotional power on a force rarely applied to the large-scale cinema: irony of the most delicate variety.

It works astonishingly well. Screenwriter Mark Peploe has used the flashback form to cover 60 years of remote, enigmatic history, and for once the device accurately reflects reality. In the '50s, as a prisoner of the victorious Chinese Communists, Pu Yi (played as an adult by John Lone, who somehow makes stunned passivity hypnotic) was indeed forced to confront his past. The length and rigor of his sentence depended largely on how his recollections conformed to Maoist history, and so the simple act of remembrance becomes inherently suspenseful. More important, a contrast and an analogy are enforced by the close juxtaposition of past and present. The imperial past offered Pu Yi privilege at an awesome level; the imprisoned present demands denial at the meanest level. But each equally cramped Pu Yi's spirit, denied him his full humanity.

Still, it is imagistically, not intellectually, that The Last Emperor asserts what will probably be a lasting claim on memory. Bertolucci has restored to the Forbidden City all the life it once sustained: a detachment of troops clattering through the night to seize a baby from his crib and place him on the throne; the Emperor's English tutor (Peter O'Toole) flapping through the streets on his bicycle; an Emperor and his bride (the lovely, fragile Joan Chen) overwhelmed by their huge wedding chamber; the great courtyard filled with wailing eunuchs, dismissed by their ruler; a tennis court, so strangely out of place in these precincts and yet the locale where Pu Yi hears that he has been deposed -- all of this is Bertolucci at his effortless best, a man from whom unforgettable visual metaphors seem to flow of their own accord.

There are times when history fails Bertolucci, imposing on his story Pu Yi's conscious collaboration with the Japanese -- a great black hole, morally and politically obscure, that threatens to swallow up the movie. Yet the director's eye remains preternaturally alert. He almost redeems the film's long middle passage with a scene showing the Emperor crooning Am I Blue? for his courtiers in exile. And the film's concluding sequence, so clear, so inevitable, should not be spoiled by discussion. Very simply, Bertolucci has found an elegance of design and execution that few of his contemporaries could even dream of. One can almost see him running through the Forbidden City, his imagination fevered by its splendor, his ambitions running high, as Pu Yi's never did. He is the movie epic's last emperor.