Australian director Baz Luhrmann has long shown a significant interest in music and dance. His first movie was the delightful Strictly Ballroom, which revolved around dance competitions. His second, which went as William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet but should have been called Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, so individualistic was it, set an abbreviated Bard to a hip rock and rap soundtrack. The soundtrack was so hip, in fact, that it kicked the idea of the movie soundtrack CD as a special compilation of tracks into a new realm of success. In the meantime, Luhrmann has directed operas on the stage and even had a hit single with the odd monologue-to-music Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen).
It is not surprising, then, that his new movie should be a musical, even one as unusual as Moulin Rouge!
The Sarafina!-style exclamation mark helps to distinguish it from John Huston’s 1952 biopic of the artist Toulouse Lautrec, who was an habitué of the famous musical theatre. He pops up again in Luhrmann’s movie, played by John Leguizamo as a bizarre, squeaking dwarf who, with some exceptionally bohemian artist friends, is working on a play they would like to present at the venue described as “a nightclub, a dancehall and a bordello”.
Christian (Ewan McGregor, appealing as ever) is a young writer, living in this heady Paris at the turn of the last century (“It was 1899, the summer of love”), who is drawn into the schemes of Toulouse Lautrec et al. This will lead to his meeting and falling in love with Satine (an excellent Nicole Kidman), the most glittering star (and occasional courtesan) of the Moulin Rouge. He will have to compete for her love with a rich, not-so-nice duke (Richard Roxburgh, playing a caricature with skill). That forms the basic story of the film, with some tragedy added to make a plot of almost casual melodrama.
Delicacy is not in Luhrmann’s repertoire here. In fact, what he has made is something like his take on the Bollywood musical drama. The storyline is simple, and the music keeps coming at you. Not only do the characters burst into song at the drop of a hat, but when they do they tend to sing several songs at a time. Luhrmann has not commissioned a brand-new songbook for his musical, but has instead appropriated a myriad songs or bits of songs from the popular culture of the past few decades. With gleeful post-modern anachronism, he chucks in everything from The Sound of Music to David Bowie, Madonna and Nirvana; if he can’t get a whole song in (such as the hilarious parody-remake of Madonna’s Like a Virgin), he’ll use a piece of it, and if he can’t do that he’ll just quote it in passing in the dialogue.
The effect produced is something startlingly new, and Lurhmann delivers it all with every possible cinematic trick he can muster, as well as sets of delirious luxuriance (Satine’s boudoir looks like a mad Hindu shrine). The combination of these elements makes Moulin Rouge! a dizzying visual and sonic experience that overwhelms any resistance and simply sweeps you away. It’s all highly artificial, existing in a dreamlike world entirely its own, and if the plot is operatically histrionic and the humour rather sitcom in places, the movie forces you by its sheer frenetic bravura to accept it on its own terms.
It is hard to take the story very seriously, and the tragedy is too cartoonish to move one in the slightest, which makes it feel a little empty on that level. But Moulin Rouge! is entertainment of the most dazzling variety, a whirlwind collage of music and movement to which, like an out-of-control acid (or absinthe) trip, one simply has to succumb.