Wonderful movie, wonderful music, wonderful style

Rating: 9/10 (30 December 2001)

* WARNING: CONTAINS A small SPOILER (but this movie is not really about the story anyway, so it probably does not matter :) ) *
Moulin Rouge is all about style and appearance. But what style! The wonderful way the movie is executed makes it incredibly, breathtakingly, enjoyable, despite having a rather pedestrian love story as its "plot".

To be analytical, the basic story: a theatre making a story about two lovers with an interfering rich third man, by a cast living through the same experience, is nothing new. Old idea, but good. The fact that the heroine dies at the end might be strange to American audiences, but is the only reasonable way to finish the movie, without really solving the "problem" of a rich lover and poor loved.
Anyway, this movie lives from its style. The way in which popular songs are used, using lyrics not written for this particular movie as if they were an original musical score, is brilliant. Each song has its own set of connotations, due to the group who first made it popular and the trends it belonged to, and these connotations sometimes make the whole experience quite sublime.
The start, where Nirvana's "Smells like teen spirit" is intervowen with Patti LaBelles "Lady marmalade" is just plain genius! The use of "Sound of Music" is hilarious. You wait and wait for Queens "The Show Must go On", and finally it comes. Elton John's lyrics for "Your Song" are really allowed to mean something more... "Like a Virgin" is a crazy take on the Madonna music video, and the list just goes on and on and on!
The visuals are often stunning, and the way is which realism is completely ignored just adds to the fun (I believe it was a bottles thrown out of a window is made to bounce on the Eiffel tower :) ).
There is a cartload of slapstick thrown in, like the cartoonish climbing of the elephant by Toulouse Lautrec, or the way in which an unconscious actor falls through the hero's roof at the start. Just wonderful!
Never mind the hero blabbing along about "love is everything": anything else would be utterly at odds with the strong colors and high volume of the movie! This is not about being realistic or believable, but about being entertaining! Never mind that the end is given at the start of the movie: that is part of the drama!
All in all, a movie that is a jumble of wonderful scenes set to fantastic music, and with a thread of a plot that is just thick and dramatic enough to carry it all through.
See it!