Pu Yi, the son of a Manchu prince, becomes ruler of China at the age of three, but as he grows up he realizes that the condition of holder of supreme power is very similar to that of a prisoner: it is like the cricket closed in the box that a courtier gives him at the beginning of the film. For The Last Emperor Bertolucci relies once again on Storaro, on the set designer Scarfiotti, who reconstructs the Ming style, on the talented costume designer James Acheson, responsible for nine thousand outfits and a budget of two million dollars. One hundred Italians, one hundred and fifty Chinese, twenty English people work on the set and nineteen thousand extras are employed. The work costs twenty-three million dollars, receives four Golden Globes, the César ’88, nine Oscars and eight David di Donatello. It is a blockbuster, the first of the so-called “trilogy of elsewhere”, that is, a creation that radically distances itself from the productive dimension of Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man. The broad scope of the story recalls the fresco of Novecento, and the similarities do not stop there: in fact The Last Emperor is made on a structure identical to that of the 1976 film. There they were two (in reality opposing parts of the same historical individual), here a single child is "born" into official history to deny it almost immediately, as Alfredo Berlinghieri did. The fears, loneliness, sloth and impotence of the young Po Valley scion prefigure the states of mind of the last Lord of Ten Thousand Years: both figures descend from Prince Sigismondo in Life is a Dream by Calderón de la Barca. The existence of Alfredo and Olmo was subject to the cyclical laws of nature and History; similarly, the Forbidden City in Beijing has imprisoned Pu Yi since childhood and, when from emperor he becomes a prisoner and then a simple citizen of the People's Republic, the situation does not change: the real power still resides outside the metaphorical tower in which the protagonist has spent almost all his time.
