Baz Luhrmann must have been in a state of giggly-delirium the entire time he was imagining Moulin Rouge. His thought process, surely a mash-up of glitzy decadence and kitschy tragedy, may have started off simple - a rock opera in one of the world's most famous night clubs, The Moulin Rouge - and yet somewhere along the way (perhaps after that first puff) it became a mess. Don't get me wrong, Moulin Rouge is a unique mess in a very appealing way: its grandiose chords of emotion, spliced over Luhrman's crazy pop-synthesis direction, have a way of lodging in your brain. All the while the film rhapsodizes on late twentieth pop-music - its characters burst spontaneously into Madonna, Elton John, Blondie, Nirvana - with an adulation very near mockery. But as much as the film may wow! you with its vivid boldness, it will most assuredly also leave you feeling stir-crazy...and a little sick.
Set in and around Paris in the year 1900, our first introduction is to Christian (Ewan McGregor), a young bohemian writer who through a series of strange events (The Sound of Music is referenced) ends up as a writer of a rock opera. As part of the job description he must meet Satine (Nicole Kidman), the vampy infamous star-courtesan of The Moulin Rouge, a steamy Parisian dance club headed by Harold Zidler (Jim Broadbent). His first encounter, and the audience's, with the club is a tossed-off shrug of zonked out camera twitches, a desperate attempt by Luhrman to re-assert himself as the master of his truly singular style: riccocco pulp opera. The result of all his mad-house camera-work is that nothing seems to be making sense, or really happening. That is, until Satine herself appears from the ceiling, encircled by hot blue light. The film doesn't begin to work there though, bogged down as it is by Lynchian freakshows and an atmosphere of perverse claustrophobia. In fact it doesn't hit its rhythm until a vibrant Blondie-duet between Satine and Christian nearly forty minutes in.
A romance is built between Satine and Christian. Satine however has been promised to The Duke (Richard Roxburgh), The Moulin Rouge's financier. As a result, the two lovebirds have to keep their encounters a secret. As a result of that result, much like in - though garnering none of its wit - Shakespeare In Love, Christian writes his affair into his opera, "Spectacular Spectacular!". There is so much going on in the movie by that point though, that such a tragic turn becomes a thing of minor consequence...especially when held up against the gaudy potency of "Come What May".
Filled with music as it is, Moulin Rouge has a nasty tendency to remain oddly at arm's length; for all of its notes, only a handful don't go flat. When it does achieve the wild fantasia it needs so badly, Moulin Rouge has a magnetism that is undeniable. Its soundtrack is a work of ironic subversion and the leads, perhaps surprisingly, make all the right noise. Kidman does the best acting of her career, her waifish beauty in full tawdry splendor, and McGregor, in a star-making move, plumbs the startling depths of his talent for the one consistent note of sincerity in the entire film.
One cannot deny however that for all of its showy visual kicks (and there are many, Luhrman turns Paris into a digital playground) and clever sound-play, the core of the film is one of drugged impossibility; it is a deep-dish dream of an acid-trip for musical junkies to be sure but not one for the everyday moviegoer due mostly to the fact that half of what is going on isn't even really discernible...or necessary. Costumes, make-up, characters, and melodramatic contrivances are piled on with reckless frenzy - a sort of headache-inducing way of testing the "how far can I go?" question present in all imaginative cinematic work. The answer? Moulin Rouge goes way too far, way too often.
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