So, I’ll be the first to admit that I am not generally a fan of movie musicals. Get me a stage musical, which admittedly I don’t do all that often, and I am far more likely to hold my suspension of disbelief when everybody breaks into song at the same time. That’s not to say there aren’t some musicals I dig. It’s just not something that comes naturally to me as a cinephile. It doesn’t help that most of the best known were written for the stage and adapted to varying levels of success to the screen.
But Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! was written for the screen! And it certainly looks unique! How about that one?
Christian (Ewan McGregor) is a wannabe Bohemian whose only problem is he’s never known love. He wants to, and he moves to Paris to find it. He manages to fall in with a group of performers led by John Leguizamo’s Henri de Toulouse-Lautec. They recruit him when he finishes some song lyrics for them by breaking out with a line that should be familiar to anyone familiar with movie musicals.
That’s more or less how this movie’s songs go. They reuse songs, lines, or music from other pop and rock songs and various other highly recognizable pieces of music and then mishmash it all together to tell the story it’s trying to tell.
And before I go on…why do so many stories I’ve read use Toulouse-Lautec, a real painter from this era, in them? I’ve seen the guy depicted in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and Christopher Moore’s comedic novel Sacre Bleu. Is it because he was, shall we say, a bit on the short side?
Regardless, Christian’s new friends want to audition for the Moulin Rouge and have something prepared for the luminous main performer Satine (the absolutely beautiful Nicole Kidman). Satine and boss Harold Zidler (Jim Broadbent) are looking to set up a larger venue, and to that end, Zidler promised Satine to the possessive Duke of Monroth (Richard Roxburgh) in the hopes of getting him to invest in the Moulin Rouge. However, Satine meets Christian first and the two fall in love. But for the Moulin Rouge to become what it could be, they’ll need to keep this secret from the jealous Duke. Oh, and Satine is dying of tuberculosis.
Alright, so, this one was weird. I’m not much of a Luhrmann fan. I’ve seen most of his Romeo + Juliet, but I prefer to be able to listen to the Shakespeare in any adaptation of the bard of Avon’s work, and when there’s a lot of distracting visuals going on, that’s a lot harder. Hence the reason I’ve only seen most of it since I gave up with about twenty minutes left. So, here we see him doing something that is more or less original and the distracting visuals are more of the point. And this is a very visually-oriented movie, one where a mustachioed Man in the Moon sings operatic back-up as Christian serenades Satine over the very concept of love being all you need.
However, much of what happens reminds me of the Discworld book Maskerade. That book mocked opera conventions, and much of the joke seemed to be that opera isn’t meant to be realistic so much as it is about being bombastic or something. And that certainly describes Moulin Rouge! That’s obvious from the visuals, but the story itself isn’t all that deep and neither are the characters. The movie seems more inclined to give the viewer a pure visual experience, and for what it’s worth, that’s not my thing at all. Satine dies in the end, and I couldn’t bring myself to care. I wasn’t even sure the movie wanted me to. That’s a bit of a problem. It was certainly creative work, but still incredibly shallow in its execution.
Grade: C
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