Brilliant but flawed

Rating: 8/10 (20 September 2001)

Moulin Rouge is an amazing film, you cannot deny it that. I cannot praise it highly enough. The musical numbers are a work of genius, and show excellence in every single aspect of film-making, and some aspects you didn't even know existed. It shows touches of brilliance in places where other films don't even have places. The acting is superb and because the acting is superb the casting is superb. The singing is wonderful too. The duets between Nicole and Ewan are delightful, and the no-holds-barred in-your-face song and dance routines are breathtaking. Musically, there is genius stamped all over this film - where else are you going to find Lady Marmalade blended perfectly with Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit; Madonna's Like A Virgin re-worked into a mini-operetta; or a love serenade that glides seamlessly from The Beatles to Whitney Houston without seeming out of place? And at the heart of it all, a tragic love story so simple and pure that it could have flowed from the pen of Shakespeare or been scrawled by the stylus of Homer.
And yet, this high-concept simplicity of the story proves to be the downfall of the film. With no other concepts on the menu other than Ewan's undying love for Nicole, and her predicament, the film is doomed from the onset - it has nowhere to go but towards its final destination, and nothing to do but repeat itself until it gets there. There are several key lines and song lyrics in the film which will stick in your head at the end; but were you astute enough to notice that the only reason they stuck is because you heard them six times each? It's as though the writers had a photocopying problem and ended up with a rogue page of dialogue repeatedly popping up elsewhere in the script. Either that or Baz Luhrmann is unaccustomed to the phrase "flogging a dead horse". That major plot simplicity gripe aside, the only other thing that irked me was the cinematography - a lot of the time images looked as though they had very little depth of field and poor reproduction of dark colours, almost as if they had been shot on a poor-quality DV camera. Maybe this was intentional and maybe not, but either way it did the film no favours. Having said which, all the colours and digitally-enhanced bits were vibrant, and you can forget any stunning landscape or sunset shots you may have seen in your life, because the close-ups of Nicole's face have redefined the meaning of beautiful cinematography - at least in my humble opinion :)
Anyway, as you can probably tell by my words, Moulin Rouge is a two-faced demon of a film - at its best, inspired, uplifting, and beautiful; and at its worst, repetitive, clichÃ©d, and overly simplistic.
I'm sure it will be remembered forever for its daring originality in bringing a forgotten genre back to life, but whether it deserves a place in our memories as one of the all-time great films... is highly debatable to say the least.