Adapted from the book From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi by Pu Yi
At the age of two, Pu Yi became Emperor of China. At the age of six, he was forced to abdicate, but was still allowed to remain in the Forbidden City, surrounded by people who treated him as royalty. Thus, he grew up with all the privilege of an emperor with none of the responsibilities. As a young man, he became a puppet emperor of the Japanese-controlled state of Manchukuo, which he fake-ruled until the end of World War II. Later he was imprisoned and "remolded" by the Communist party, and spent the rest of his life as their poster boy.
This is one of those rare occasions when the movie is a vast improvement over the book. Generally, I'm not an advocate of films adding more drama, but the book was so incredibly lethargic that the story greatly benefited from the additions in the movie. The book is entirely chronological, but the film spices things up by starting with Pu Yi's arrest and attempted suicide (the latter of which was not recorded in the book at all), and then showing his early life in flashbacks as he reflects on it. The book forces the reader to slog through all the history, and then revisit episodes the reader barely remembers as Pu Yi at first lies to make himself look better, then tells what really happened. This makes the film much easier to follow than the book, as well as more engaging.
One of the biggest differences between the book and the film is the way the female characters are portrayed. Pu Yi barely mentions his wife and consorts in the book. The movie eliminates all but his first consort (I think he actually had four or five, it was hard to keep track), but it does turn her and the Empress into actual people with personalities. The edition of the book I read included several translator notes, which were probably the most informative part, and the translator indicated a couple of times that none of Pu Yi's marriages were consummated due to his impotence. None of this was mentioned in the book itself, but it might partly explain why he didn't seem to think the women in his life were worth talking much about. The filmmakers either didn't know about his deficiency or didn't care, because he definitely has sex in the movie. However, after his consort divorces him, he apparently stops sleeping with the empress, and she has an affair with her driver. When she becomes pregnant, Pu Yi tries to claim him as an heir, but the Japanese know who the father is and kill both the driver and the baby when it's born. The trauma of this is implied to contribute greatly to the empress's opium addiction. If any of that actually happened, it definitely wasn't in the book. She does become an opium addict, but there's no affair, no pregnancy, no murdered baby. But the story is way more interesting with all of that added.
The other major difference is the film's omission of the nauseating Communist propaganda that makes up the entire last third of the book. Over and over again, Pu Yi stresses how sure he was that the Communists were going to kill him or torture him, but instead they were kind and tried to help him become a better person. Once the Communists took over, all the poor people who had barely survived the Manchukuo-inflicted suffering were living wonderful lives, and isn't everything so wonderful for China now? In fairness, I'm sure there were people whose lives were improved by the new government, but I know a little too much about Mao's oppressive policies to share Pu Yi's reverence for him (if Pu Yi even wrote this whole book, which there seems to be some doubt about). Since the film was made by Westerners, it shouldn't be too surprising that it does not reflect the same enthusiasm for the Communist Party of China. The film portrays most of the prison guards as being angry and accusatory, which they were not at all in the book. The one warden with whom Pu Yi bonds due to his kindness and care is later shown being punished as a traitor to the Party (again, not in the book). Granted, the book was written while Mao was in power, so I don't think it would have been published without all the fawning over the Party that it does. Pu Yi was similarly enthralled by the Japanese during the Manchukuo days, until the Communists showed him how oppressive that regime had been. Sadly, it appears that no one ever showed him the same about the Mao regime. By adding the scene with the Party turning on the prison warden, the film exposes the former emperor's devotion to the new government as the naivete it was, which one only gets from the book by reading between the lines. One can't help feeling bad for Pu Yi in both versions, since he never truly got to be his own person in his whole life. The film shows him beginning to realize that, whereas in the book, he believes he has found freedom at last, failing to grasp that he has become a puppet yet again. I'm not sure which is better; both scenarios are pretty depressing.
Coming up next: Dangerous Liaisons, adapted from the novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
