IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
MOULIN ROUGE Directed by Baz Luhrmann With Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor UA North, De Vargas PG-13 126 min
The first ten minute of Moulin Rouge are a bit unsettling. It's like arriving at a party where everyone is at least three drinks ahead of you. They're all feeling giggly and hilarious and you're wondering what the hell you're doing there. But as you're fumbling for your keys and mumbling your excuses, the spirit of the occasion starts getting to you. And then, what a party!
Nominally the action is set in and around Paris's legendary Moulin Rouge at the end of the 19th century, but the real setting is in the romantic imagination. Director Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet) and production designer Catherine Martin have created an opulent digital fantasy of Montmartre, and peopled it with a wild and crazy cast of characters.
The narrator is Christian (Ewan McGregor), who functions as the Christopher Isherwood of this cabaret, and his Sally Bowles is the beautiful courtesan and Moulin Rouge diva Satine (Nicole Kidman). The role of Master of Ceremonies is manned by Jim Broadbent (Topsy-Turvy) as Zidler, the impresario with a bluster of toughness and a heart of mush. Christian has come to Paris to be a writer, and he soon falls in with a crowd of Bohemians led by that zany little painter Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo) who hang out at the Moulin Rouge. Christian is swept up by their credo of "truth, beauty, freedom and love," (the summer of 1899, like another season seven decades later, was apparently a "summer of love,") and he lets himself be drafted to write a musical extravaganza for Satine and the Moulin Rouge.
He falls for Satine, and she for him - beneath the rouge and provocative costumes beats an honest, loving heart - but the course of true love is complicated by disease (she has a nasty cough, and it leaves ominous spots of blood on her handkerchief) and economics (a musical, even in 1899, could not be mounted for a song.)
Enter the wicked Duke of Worcester (Richard Roxburgh), who wants to bankroll the show and bedroll its star. And so it goes - dissembling and stolen moments, agony and ecstasy, sacrifice, villainy, and heroism, all building to a romantic climax.
But the story is only a small part of the story. Moulin Rouge is about rapture, and the rapture explodes from every pore of this glossy reinvention of the musical. Luhrmann has packed it with a pot-pourri of 20th-century hits, and from the moment Christian extemporizes Elton John's "Your Song" for his admiring new pals, the movie stakes out a roller-coaster course that invites you to hang on for a wild ride or bail out then and there while the getting is good.
The pop flows like a barrel of weasels, with songs like "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend", "The Sound of Music", "Roxanne", "Lady Marmalade", "All you Need is Love", and a hilariously saturnine rendition of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" sung by Broadbent. McGregor strikes the right note of puppydog lovesickness and earnest pluck as Christian, and Kidman is irresistible in a performance that will make you forget all about Tom Cruise. But the biggest star is Luhrmann, who stages this lollapalooza of an entertainment like a man deeply in the grip of hallucinogenic drugs.
Above, beneath, and throbbing through all the flash is the unabashed romanticism that is at the core of most great musicals. It's driven home by the coda that reappears throughout the movie, from Nat "King" Cole's 1948 hit "Nature Boy": "The greatest thing "You'll ever learn "Is just to love, "And be loved "In return."
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