After two weeks of delay, I finally finished watching "The Last Emperor".
Three and a half hours is too long for a movie and too short for Puyi's life.
I love the text of this film so much. This story is so good that during the whole process of watching the movie, I could not spare any extra effort to read the composition and listen to the soundtrack, and I was completely immersed in this story.
Here, I see Puyi, a living person.
Not the emperor of the Qing Dynasty, not the regent of the puppet Manchukuo, not the war criminal No. 981, just a not-so-ordinary ordinary person. He likes grasshoppers and mice, so he keeps them secretly; he is curious about the outside world, and wants to take Wanrong to Oxford to go to school; he will lie to avoid punishment, saying that the Japanese forced him to become Manchukuo Emperor; he will also have moments of despair, admitting many trumped-up charges...
He has innocence and ambition, he can deceive and despair, he is selfish and kind.
It is not the good of the false perfection, and it is not the unforgivable bad. In the final analysis, he is an ordinary person who has been placed in a high position by fate.
But in the vigorous era, no one was ever spared. Even if he is in a high position, he can't escape the cloud and rain in the hand of fate.
Puyi's life is constantly losing.
When the nurse left, he couldn't leave the Forbidden City; E-niang committed suicide, but he still couldn't leave the Forbidden City; he was the monarch of a country in name, but in fact he couldn't decide whether he could wear glasses or not; he once braved the world to cooperate with Japan, Attempts to restore the prosperity of the Qing Dynasty through the hands of others, but in the end he became a puppet of others, carrying a long-standing infamy on his back.
He tried hard, but when he looked back, he found that he couldn't earn his fate at all. In the turbulent torrent of the times, there are too few that he can hold.
That feeling of powerlessness in the face of fate is simply breathless.
The most uncomfortable scene in the movie is when the Kuomintang troops entered the Forbidden City and gave Puyi an hour to pack and leave. He only paused, and then said to the two wives, "You always wanted to leave the Forbidden City, Now you've got an hour to pack"; the other was that Puyi bought a ticket after being released after ten years in prison , walked into the Forbidden City that once belonged to him.
It was so painful. My heart throbbed when I watched it. The so-called tragedy is really tearing up the beautiful things for others to see.
As a viewer a hundred years later, the years on the screen have stabbed me to hide. It's hard for me to imagine, when these ups and downs hit Puyi with real swords and guns, how did he endure all this?
No matter how documentary the film is, it still articulates the suffering he endured. And I am often confused, whether I, who shed a few cheap tears for the grandeur of the world of light and shadow, is trying to empathize with his pain, or just consuming other people's pain self-righteously.
Too much has happened in 2020. There are too many twists and turns, ridiculous; there are too many ugly human nature, vicissitudes of life. So much dignity has been trampled on, so much struggle has been drowned. Before, I always felt that suffering life is the rich mine of stories. Life with ups and downs is worth having a good story of its own.
Now I don't feel that way.
Pain is pain, and pain itself has no meaning. If a person is willing to cut his own blood and tears, or empathize with the pain of others, and pour it into art, it is a great nobility. But as a spectator, if the highest evaluation of the suffering of others is just a sentence "worthy of making a good movie", then I would be too cold-blooded.
Pain is always the torment of people in the whirlpool, and people are always higher than art.
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