The Cinematic Equivalent of a Migraine Attack

Rating: 3/10 (7 December 2004)

How's this for an original plot? A beautiful but consumptive Parisian courtesan finds true unselfish love with an idealistic young man. I can't think where I've heard that one before.
'Moulin Rouge!' is set in the famous nightclub in 1899/1900. Christian, an aspiring young English writer falls in love with Satine, a courtesan who is also the Moulin Rouge's most famous dancer. (Just how she manages to dance so energetically even though she is dying of consumption is never explained). Christian has a rival for Satine's affections in the shape of an evil but immensely wealthy Duke. Anyone who has read 'La Dame aux Camellias' can work out the rest.
The film is not intended to be a period piece or an attempt to recreate the atmosphere of fin-de-siecle Paris. Although the era had its own very distinctive musical culture, some of which is still familiar today thanks to films such as 'Can-Can' or the original 'Moulin Rouge' from the fifties, Baz Luhrmann took the decision to ignore this, using modern pop music instead, so we get the characters singing along to the likes of 'One Day I'll Fly Away', Madonna's 'Like a Virgin' or David Bowie's 'Diamond Dogs'. The idea was presumably to make something unorthodox and to get away from the traditional Hollywood musical.
While I can appreciate Luhrmann's ambition to try something unconventional, I did not appreciate the result. Both Nicole Kidman as Satine and Ewan McGregor as Christian did their own singing, but although Kidman's voice is pleasant enough I felt that neither of them have strong enough singing voices to take the leading roles in a film musical. The old system whereby professional singers were often hired to dub the voices of star-name actors had a lot to be said for it. The set-piece choral numbers, by contrast, tended to sound harsh and strident.
If the film sounded bad, it looked even worse. The sets and costumes looked cheap and tacky, the colours were garish and the camera-work must have been done by someone on an acid trip. Ditto the editing. The acting is defiantly and quite deliberately over the top, the worst offender being Jim Broadbent whose performance as Harold Zidler, the owner of the Moulin Rouge, must rate as one of the most manic displays of overacting ever seen. Kidman and McGregor are only slightly better; I was left quite unmoved by the pathos of the young lovers' plight.
With its strident music, garish colours and hectic visuals, this film is the cinematic equivalent of a migraine attack. Those who see it as a triumph of style over substance are being too charitable. Certainly, there is little substance here, but nobody could call this loud, vulgar, tasteless and self-satisfied film stylish except those who confuse tawdry glitz with style. 3/10. (To those who would say that this is a woman's picture that men cannot appreciate, I would reply that my wife scored it 0/10).