May 18, 2001 | Baz Luhrmann’s incessantly sensational Moulin Rouge is a surreal, supercharged whirligig of artifice and feeling, irony and intensity. Set in an exuberantly decadent dreamworld of 1900 Paris, but throbbing and undulating to rhythms of late-20th-century pop standards, the movie is a postmodern collage of opulent grand operas, Old Hollywood musicals, cutting-edge music videos and India’s bigger-than-life Bollywood extravaganzas.
You might expect such time-tripping and cultural cross-pollination from Luhrmann, the same cheeky Aussie who spun the doomed romance of Shakespearean tragedy into the collateral damage of Miami gang warfare in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. But even that outrageous folly couldn’t prepare you for the frenetic blur of sights and sounds that await you in Luhrmann’s latest excess. Moulin Rouge is a breakneck spectacle of furious razzle-dazzle, mischievous anachronism and shoot-the-moon melodrama. Even if you hate it – which, occasionally, is quite easy to do – you can’t help being impressed by the sheer audacity of the endeavor. And during some of the elaborate production numbers, you may find yourself savoring a rollercoaster rush of excitement.
Trouble is, even at its sporadic best – during those inspired stretches when all the disparate elements gel beautifully, even magically – the movie remains frustratingly distant, far removed from your embrace. Moulin Rouge quickens your pulse, but it never really touches your heart.
The script, cobbled together by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, pilfers shamelessly from sources as diverse as La Traviata, 42nd Street, An American in Paris, the ancient Orpheus legend and the 1980s MTV playlist. Christian (Ewan McGregor), a would-be bohemian, journeys to turn-of-the-last-century Paris to write about “truth, beauty and, most of all, love.” He immediately falls in with artist Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo), who literally falls through the ceiling of Christian’s shabby apartment while preparing a new show – optimistically titled Spectacular, Spectacular – for the trendy Moulin Rouge nightclub. Christian joins the creative team, introducing a crazy-quilt medley that begins with The Sound of Music and climaxes with Children of the Revolution.
Lautrec senses a hit, a palpable hit, so he takes the show – and Christian – to see Zidler (Jim Broadbent), the amorally robust impresario and master of ceremonies at the Moulin Rouge. Once at the legendary nightclub, rendered by Luhrmann as the 1900 equivalent of Studio 54, Christian falls for Satine (Nicole Kidman), a leggy chanteuse and part-time courtesan who commands the mostly male audience with all the haughty swagger of a ruby-lipped, radiantly pale dominatrix. (“I’m paid,” she explains, “to make men believe what they want to believe.”) Satine mistakes Christian for a wealthy duke she’s supposed to seduce – at Zidler’s behest, in order to ensure funding for the next big Moulin Rouge show – and she doesn’t realize her mistake until she’s kinda-sorta mad about the boy. By that time, of course, he’s just wild about her.
Unfortunately, the real duke, played by Richard Roxburgh as a slow-witted and quick-tempered rotter, refuses to finance a production of Spectacular, Spectacular unless he has exclusive rights to Satine. Even more unfortunately, the romantic triangle may not have a hypotenuse for long: The opening scenes announce, and Satine’s periodic coughing fits underscore, that this won’t be a story with much happily-ever-aftering.
Treating his tragicomic plot as just so much pop kitsch for slicing and dicing, Luhrmann directs Moulin Rouge with all the whirling-dervish frenzy of someone desperately trying to entertain an audience of Ritalin-deprived, attention-deficient thrill-seekers. His camera swoops and swirls over digitized dioramas of Paris street scenes. His dance sequences are fractured into chaotic abstractions by rapid-fire editing. And as for the songs – well, truth to tell, we don’t really get whole songs, only tantalizing bits and pieces: A line or two from one, then an off-hand allusion to another, followed by a wink-wink reference to a third, and so it goes.
When Satine first appears in performance at the Moulin Rouge, she is a Marilyn/Madonna icon at the center of a showstopper that samples Material Girl, Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, Lady Marmalade – this new version of the classic is a current chart-topper, though you don’t hear nearly enough of it here – and, bizarrely, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. Later, when Satine and Christian musically woo each other in her faux-Indian penthouse, he begins with the eager longing of Elton John’s Your Song, she counters with a cynically reconstituted All You Need Is Love, and they continue on and on while referencing hits by U2, Phil Collins, Paul McCartney and several others. It’s all very clever, but, like so much else in Moulin Rouge, it goes by too quickly to strike emotional sparks. On the other hand, if you’re old enough to remember the days when Dean Martin and Judy Garland did this sort of thing with their TV variety-show guests, you’ll likely feel a pleasant twinge of nostalgia.
But that’s not quite enough. When Kidman (who sings passably well) expresses the melancholy longing of One Day I’ll Fly Away, or when McGregor (who sings even better) interrupts his “love medley” for the full-throttle romantic fervor of Up Where We Belong, the sudden rush of passion is stunning, stirring. Throughout most of the rest of the movie, however, neither the well-cast leads nor the madcap supporting players get a chance to truly soar. No doubt about it, Moulin Rouge is an eye-popping, attention-grabbing piece of work. But it could have been more, a lot more, had Luhrmann provided more heart and soul between the outbursts of fireworks.
