A vortex of nervous energy, Baz Luhrmann is waiting in the foyer of the Twentieth Century Fox screening room to present Moulin Rouge! to a few members of the New York press prior to its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
The 38-year-old director, an intense, loquacious Aussie, seems eager to explain there and then how his baroque backstage epic was forged not just from the Hollywood musical, but also from 19th-century opera and literature and everything from George Méliès’s primitive fantasy films to rave culture.
But everyone’s attention is soon drawn to his towering leading lady, Nicole Kidman, when she glides across the foyer with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter following a half-step behind her like a courtier.
Kidman brushes a strand of hair away from her face and gazes at the floor, as if to say: “There’s no need to look at me.” But we all do, just as everyone stares at Satine, her languishing courtesan in Moulin Rouge!
“There’s a revelation about Nicole Kidman,” says Luhrmann a few days later. “We think of her as an icy icon, but she’s actually this wacky, crazy, girl-next-door type who happens to have the body of a goddess. The film has allowed her to reveal that funny side. And when she smiles, it’s like oxygen.”
The beneficiary of Satine’s smiles in Moulin Rouge! is Christian (Ewan McGregor), a young provincial poet who has fetched up in 1899 Paris and fallen in with a group of bohemians trying to stage a musical comedy. Seizing on his ability to extemporise song lyrics, they bring him to the celebrated Montmartre nightclub to meet a duke (Richard Roxburgh) who might back their play. There, Christian meets and falls in love with Satine — bait for the duke — and she with him.
Although Kidman succeeds in making Satine a flesh-and-blood woman in the film’s few naturalistic scenes, she is equally a dazzling postmodern sex-and-death symbol collaged together from any number of enchantresses. These include the consumptive heroine of La Bohème, Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, the Marilyn Monroe of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Madonna’s Material Girl, who mimicked Monroe singing Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend. With a touch of Ann-Margret, Kidman rasps the same song while dangling from a swing above hordes of slumming aristocrats in the jaw-dropping musical set piece that introduces Satine.
Luhrmann deliberately set out to rejuvenate the musical. “I grew up in the middle of nowhere in New South Wales,” he says. “There was a gas station and a farm, but also a local cinema which my father ran for a while. One of the earliest pictures I saw was Paint Your Wagon. It’s not a very good musical, but it enlivened me to the idea that there was a job to be done. With Moulin Rouge!, we’ve only opened the door, but other filmmakers will come and define the code.
“Before we made the film,” he elaborates, “we did an archaeological dig through the history of the musical. What we found is that the stories don’t change, but the way in which you tell them does. You have to find a code for any particular place and moment in time.”
The code he and co-writer Craig Pearce hit upon involved imposing the millennium spirit of 1999/2000 on the belle époque, though the Moulin Rouge in the film also raises the spectre of Studio 54. Anyone expecting a remake of John Huston’s 1952 Moulin Rouge or Jean Renoir’s 1955 French Cancan will be disappointed. (The cancan is frenziedly danced in the film, but as it might be at an all-night rave.)
Luhrmann and Pearce loosely modelled the story on the Greek myth of Orpheus, who could charm wild beasts with his singing, but failed to retrieve his wife Eurydice from Hades because he looked back. In Moulin Rouge!, having won Satine in the palace of sin, Christian makes the fateful mistake of telling the duke that Satine doesn’t love him, whereupon the duke, who has agreed to produce Christian’s friends’ play, turns the screw.
Luhrmann says he needed “to deal with an Orphean-style story about growing up and coming to that point in your life when you realise there are things bigger than yourself.
“People die and relationships end. We’ve all been young men or women who dreamt of being creative, who rejected our bourgeois backgrounds, who’ve gone to the city — whether it’s Paris or New York or London — and fallen into some incredible relationship that is purely romantic and related to that moment.
“But that relationship cannot be, and it passes on by. That moment is like a poem or a dream, but if you look back, it will destroy you. We strove to give the film that sense.”
The city that Luhrmann headed for was Sydney, where he was born in 1963. His father, who died on the first day of the Moulin Rouge! shoot in 1999, had served as a naval commander in the Vietnam War before becoming a farmer-projectionist and he schooled young Bazmark and his three siblings in resourcefulness.
After his parents split up, Luhrmann lived first with his father and then his mother, a ballroom dancing teacher. Trained as an actor at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts in Sydney, Luhrmann starred opposite Judy Davis in 1981’s The Winter of Our Dream, but resented the school’s stifling methodology and quit to reinvent himself as a stage director.
He assisted Peter Brook on The Mahabharata in 1985, and the following year devised a 30-minute comedy lampooning the by-the-book conservatives of the Australian ballroom dancing federation.
After mounting a production of La Bohème for the Australian opera in 1990 Luhrmann raised the money to turn his Strictly Ballroom play into a movie, shot with great visual flair and a huge dose of camp. At once garish and tender, biting and romantic, it incorporates documentary elements and stylised flashbacks and was a huge hit at 1992’s Cannes festival. Luhrmann’s long-time creative partner Catherine Martin designed Strictly Ballroom and his subsequent films; they married in 1996.
In that same year Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet upped the ante. Shot mostly in Mexico but set in a mythic United States city called Verona Beach, this brash, trippy and frequently parodic post-MTV extravaganza reconfigured the Capulet-Montague feud as both Hispanic-white corporate rivalry and gang warfare, although the film’s futuristic dystopia abates when Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Juliet (Claire Danes) come together for the most passionate love scenes in Shakespeare.
The real achievement of Romeo and Juliet was that even as it scorned Shakespearean theatrical and cinematic traditions, it created a self-contained, modern urban world in which the play’s original dialogue lost none of its lyrical resonance.
Moulin Rouge! was made, Luhrmann says, in “red-curtain style, which is audience-participation cinema. We used it in Strictly Ballroom and Romeo and Juliet too. It’s very important that you choose a recognisable myth.
“In the case of Strictly Ballroom, it was David and Goliath. In Romeo and Juliet, it was Shakespeare’s 400-year-old language. Here it’s the Orpheus myth. That doesn’t mean audience members should make that connection, but they must know how the film is going to end when it begins. That’s a rule of this kind of theatricalised cinema.
“Second,” he continues, “it has to be set in a heightened creative world. That world can be exotic and distant, a land which is far away and yet can be very near to us. And then we use devices that awaken the audience to the fact that they are watching a movie.
“Most of the naturalistic cinema that’s been the vogue for years puts the audience to sleep and asks it to look at reality through a keyhole. We’re doing the exact reverse. There’s no pretence that we’re doing a social or psychological examination of Paris and the conditions of the bohemian artist in 1899. What we’re doing is telling a myth and the resonance comes from the way the story is revealed.”
Shot on sound stages in Sydney, Moulin Rouge! reportedly cost $52,5-million, a paltry sum for a big summer movie. But despite excellent reviews, it has only just recouped its cost at the US box office in 13 weeks of release. (American Pie II, which cost $30-million, made $45,1-million in its first three days.) Luhrmann’s film was simply too arty and too visionary for a movie-going public currently in a vulgarian mood.
The Australian’s update of the musical now seems unlikely to spark a general revival, although his replacement of conventional show tunes with contemporary pop and rock songs was a bold stroke. Standing on the head of a three-storey papier-maché elephant and serenading the rooftops of Paris, Kidman gives a thrilling Broadway treatment to Randy Crawford’s One Day I’ll Fly Away.
Jim Broadbent, who plays the club’s proprietor/pimp, sings a duet with the simpering duke in a bawdy comic version of Madonna’s Like a Virgin. The Police’s Roxanne re-emerges as a snarling tango reflecting the miseries of sexual jealousy. And David Bowie chimes in with a classic from the late 1940s, Eden Ahbez’s Nature Boy, which hauntingly bookends the film: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn/Is just to love and be loved in return.”
Luhrmann says the idea of using songs anachronistically is nothing new: “When Judy Garland sings The Trolley Song in Meet Me in St Louis she’s singing a Forties radio hit in 1900: it’s the equivalent of our using Beck or Fatboy Slim [who contribute songs to the soundtrack]. We use the music that the audience of today knows and loves to allow us to reveal the characters and their journeys. It’s very common in musicals to utilise music that people have a previous relationship to.
“All this layering,” he adds, “isn’t just there to be clever. We’re not just in the world of Montmartre; we’re in the world of music and movie quotations. It’s the kind of familiar software you can use to make the audience feel comfortable and, moment by moment, accept the film’s extreme changes from high comedy to high tragedy. You use all this crazy artifice to reveal the truth.”