Amazingly dazzling and mesmerizing

Rating: 10/10 (22 April 2008)

The subject is banal : Paris, 1900, the famous Moulin Rouge music-hall and their never-ending shows that are titillating and mysterious, fascinating and prodigious. Love above everything else, romantic love with its passion, the little thing deep down inside, dramatic love of course, melodramatic even. The actress of such a show is supposed to finance the show, and the work of everyone else, by providing the patrons, the generous financiers with some carnal pleasure, illusionary or real according to the desires and potencies of these rich even if rather aging males. The melodrama is reached when the actress is dying of consumption. The red of blood is mixing with the green of absinthe. But that is without taking into account Nicole Kidman who transforms that baroque and rococo tall tale of love and prostitution into what it is supposed to be, a blinding explosion of colors and fire, lights and flames. And she can keep the tears on the stage exclusively and prevent the audience from watering the succulent plants in the lobby of the movie theater. Then we are dazed by the brilliant dances, the mesmerizing music, the fascinating songs, the nostalgically innovative melodies, the special effects that are exploding everywhere and transforming a plain stage or a plain screen into some kind of cosmic big bang on the retinas of our eyes, not to speak of the eardrums of our ears. More brilliant than that you die. And Nicole Kidman, or Satine if you prefer, can die on the stage in the arms of her beloved author who is crying so much and so loud that we do not even need to do the same. And then the whole world can fall apart and we can jump into an elliptic flash forward and projects our asses from the flash back of the recollection back into the future when this Christian is reminiscing the thunderous passion of theirs and the flashes of craziness that went along with it. Thanks God this is already a classic for the next generation.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines