The dim yellow is the twilight of the capital and the tone of the whole movie. This kind of yellow is especially obvious when describing the years of the imperial city in the first half. It symbolizes imperial power. The wind, sand and smoke swept across the sky, implying the impending decline of an era. In the movie, the warden mentioned that Puyi's childhood tutor John Johnson wrote a book after returning to the UK, Twilight in Forbidden City. The name slowly sounded, which made people feel frightened. Indeed, when he was in the autumn wind in London, When looking back at every moment that I have experienced with the young Puyi, I will definitely feel that it is as if dusk is coming.
If art is to be derived from history, it means simultaneously expressing human nature and all that is associated with it. It shows the moment when the individual struggles to surface from the whirlpool of history, with the imprint of the times and the joys and sorrows of destiny, and then slowly sinks again. The life of the last emperor is a very artistic story. He can't be considered a big man, open the history books, there are actually very few records about him, ascending the throne, maintaining his name, being forced to abdicate, puppet of the puppet Manchukuo, trial, amnesty. It's not all peaceful plots, but it's always simple. He has never pointed the country, let alone the thousands of troops, nor launched a conspiracy coup. His existence has not left any iconic changes in China, and even at most of his life, there are two The gate cut him off from the outside world. However, he is also different from a small person. His background and the changes in the Qing Dynasty when he was three years old determined him such a special and awkward position in history. The last emperor, wandering between modern and modern China, wandering in In addition to the secular world and politics of China, deep in his heart, he is destined to experience the constant reincarnation of ignorance, anxiety, and depression.
Puyi's childhood shown in the film is a little Chinese-style bizarre and a little fatalistic gloom in addition to the innocence of ordinary people's childhood. A three-year-old boy stumbled off the dragon seat without authorization, watching the adults who were kneeling to him curiously, excited by a cricket. At this time, he is happy and proud, and the world in his eyes is a big toy that can be played with. In the years when he was growing up, it was a quiet atmosphere and dim light, as if it was the only paradise that could be found in this chaotic world. The language of the film is poetic: empty halls, carved royal screens, a large group of eunuchs who cover their faces and play guessing games with the little emperor... He is happy because of his ignorance, so ignorant that he is not aware of his own sorrow. There are ancient and timeless poems everywhere in the Forbidden City, but we feel oppressed in front of the poems.
But history never pays attention to individuals, whether civilians or emperors, it always roars forward, unprepared.
Puyi's story unfolds in the form of a memoir. Before Fushun accepts Shen, when the guards say "People's Republic of China", it is impossible for him to fully understand the word anyway, but he accepts it numbly, as if he had accepted it in the past. Everything is the same, and he is convinced that he has fallen into some conspiracy again, because of the unbearable first half of his life, he has never left the passive position once.
From the May 4th Movement to the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, there were countless bloody events, each with a thrilling plot that was more intense than Puyi's life, but here, they all retreated into a blurred background, magnified from it. It's nothing but an aspiring man suffering. What does he know? He seemed to know everything. He heard scattered gunshots, the screams of students when they fell to the ground, climbed over the wall of the country when he was a teenager and saw the president of the republic in a military parade, and when he was an adult, he heard planes hovering overhead occasionally and rumors kept turning. Flip turn. However, they are all intermittent and unclear. He knows what happened, but he will never know what happened. Wanrong can foresee a bit of the truth from the chaos, and Pu Yi has already decided for the first half of her life. He was unable to highlight the tragedy of the siege.
Because of those chaotic dust, China has become a nation of aphasia. Ordinary people, the silent majority, have been silent for thousands of years, and the wave after wave of politicians on the stage are nothing but clouds passing by in a hurry. Puyi's identity is special, but his psychological anxiety is universal. For anyone who is slightly aware of himself, the Forbidden City is everywhere.
Near the end of the film, at the very beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Puyi saw on the street that the warden who was responsible for reforming him in Fushun was being paraded by a group of Red Guards. He was confused and ran up to ask what the man had committed. Sin, the Red Guards replied, betraying the Party, treason, and counter-revolution. The reality looks extremely absurd under the scorching sun, and all the crimes that can be arbitrarily charged in the world seem to be the only one. The old comrade was extremely patient and finally broke the shackles in his heart and the fatal wounds that required people to take care of him everywhere, so that he went from being a blindfolded bird hitting a wall to a dull stream of people riding bicycles to buy food in Beijing. An odd one. However, it is still a dizzying world.
Perhaps the strangeness of the East lies in such reincarnation. In the eyes of the West, the Cultural Revolution may be the most incredible period of China's modernization process. It echoes the end of the Manchu Qing Dynasty at the beginning, the end of the dynasty, and the mysterious court of intrigue. The two types of weirdness, modernity and modernity, are magnified into a bizarre effect from a Western perspective. Some of the shots seem a little ridiculous to our eyes: the dying Empress Dowager Cixi sits on a dragon bed with black pearls hanging on it, speaking Shakespearean lines, the kind of straightforward majesty that should not belong to the East. But it is this magnification that is even more shocking to a Chinese, because those exaggerated shots are rooted in the vague memories of your previous life.
The word "last emperor" may mean a strange Chinese dream.
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