Moulin Rouge! (2001)

reviewed by
Shane Burridge

Moulin Rouge (2001) 126m.

There's a windmill that keeps popping up in MOULIN ROUGE every few minutes. It's not central to the plot: it's just there, decked out with pretty lights, turning around in circles and going nowhere. It's probably as good a metaphor for MOULIN ROUGE as any, although I'm tempted to think that director Baz Luhrmann originally intended it as a jokey aside to the Quixotic nature of his brash new undertaking. You will either love or hate MOULIN ROGUE, or more likely both. There's much that is wonderful and dynamic, and just as much that is irritating or hackneyed. There's certainly not much in the storyline: Ewan McGregor plays a would-be bohemian writer visiting Paris at the turn of the 20th century, where he becomes besotted with Satine (Nicole Kidman), the star attraction of the infamous Moulin Rouge nightclub. The fate of the nightclub is in the hands of an unscrupulous Duke (Richard Roxburgh) who also has his eye on Satine and will brook no competition from the lovesick McGregor.

It took me a while to figure out exactly what Luhrmann was trying to do with MOULIN ROUGE. It's a natural, if predictable, progression from his previous two films STRICTLY BALLROOM and ROMEO + JULIET but at first glance seeks only to amplify them. It wasn't until the melodrama of the film's final reel that I remembered its great opening credits, and realized that MOULIN ROUGE is intended to be a silent film - with music. Luhrmann, who I suspect would be quite pleased to become heir apparent to the throne of Postmodern Cinema, throws every reference, in-joke and quotation imaginable into what he determines to be the 21st Century version of the Musical, a genre that was pretty much defunct after the 60s. It would not suit the viewing sensibilities of modern audiences to play the story straight, as would have been done in the days of Judy Garland or Gene Kelly, so instead Luhrmann chooses to be campy and flippant. This makes the film great fun, but also repeats the inconsistency of his previous ROMEO + JULIET: MOULIN ROUGE immerses us in a totally artificial (i.e. distinctly cinematic) world with over-the-top characters and then expects us to feel genuine emotion for them at the end simply by descending into pathos.

The death scene, a less successful rehash of R+J, is tiresome, but not as tiresome as the film's other patent flaw. Luhrmann is a talented director with a wayward sense of humor, but in MOULIN ROUGE he has only one joke and it is repeated ad nauseam. Worse, it is that laziest recourse of humor, the anachronism joke. It first happens a few minutes into the film when Ewan McGregor bursts into a rendition of 'The Sound of Music'. It's a forgivable gag when it occurs, because it points out to us the direction the rest of the movie is heading. Twenty minutes later, when it becomes apparent that the characters are not going to stop quoting song lyrics as if they were prose, the joke has worn thin (and reminds us that Luhrmann had a better writer for his earlier picture!). It also raises some confusion - there is a specific audience that will be of the right age to recognize the quotes (mostly from 1970s tunes) so the spoofy nature of the dialogue will be lost on many viewers. It's one thing to have Prince's 'When Doves Cry' reformatted for choirboys in ROMEO + JULIET, but another to have McGregor and Kidman spouting Bernie Taupin lyrics as if they were poetry and talking in conversations made up entirely of lines from Jennifer Warnes, David Bowie, The Sweet, Wings, and other artists. This might be the stuff of Postmodernism but it's also a depressing reminder that a number of new film-makers are cannibalistic: they don't make movies based on books any more, they make movies based on other movies. Just to show how intertextual Luhrmann gets, Kidman's opening scene starts with her belting out 'Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend', which is abruptly interrupted by a phrase from Madonna's 'Material Girl'. Why? Because the original Madonna video clip was itself a parody of the 'Diamonds' number from the film GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES. At this stage Luhrmann isn't even making a movie based on a movie, but a movie based on a film clip based on a movie. In the end, MOULIN ROUGE is left strutting its stuff like a Frankenstein monster covered in glitter.

Despite this pot-pourri approach, MOULIN ROUGE still manages to be refreshing and original. This doesn't mean it's an original musical - the songs are well-known pop tunes that have been incorporated, mostly for humorous effect, into the storyline. I don't have any complaint with this because it wasn't uncommon for musicals of the past to be made in a similar style, with tunes cobbled together from the likes of Gershwin, Porter and Berlin to ensure good box-office - even the classic SINGING IN THE RAIN is made up of songs taken from other films. When it comes down to the bottom line, only one question needs to be asked: is this film worth seeing? The answer is yes. The high points outnumber the flaws (or, more likely, overwhelm them) and it is a gloriously cinematic spectacle which deserves to be seen and especially heard in a theater. It outdoes everything Luhrmann has done to date, and while it may not be as cohesive as his earlier work it at least seems to have been the film he has always wanted to make. Besides, anything featuring a cameo of pop princess Kylie Minogue as a hallucinatory green fairy has got to be worth checking out.

sburridge@hotmail.com

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews