If Music Be the Food of Love...

Rating: Null/10 (2 June 2001)

...Baz Lurhmann is surely a master chef. I have seen three of his films now, he has proven over and over that he knows the power of music in a film. "Moulin Rouge" is a prime example of this, being a musical by genre. And it is a film with so much potential it nearly hurts to see it thrown aside for editing and manic insanity.
The sets/costumes were wonderful. The music was amazing. There was so much potential in the cast...but there was too much "wackiness" and too little raw emotional power.
The film begins too quickly. I loved the flashback structure, but once the story, itself, began, it moved far too quickly. I have no quarrel with "love at first sight," but here it seemed a bit out of place, especially with someone in Satine's profession. If Lurhmann had lengthened the time between Satine and Christian's first meeting and the development of their love, I think I might have found it more believable. Also, I thought Satine seemed a bit overly nervous and...well...manic. Her character is reminiscent of Violetta Valery, but Violetta seemed more poised even outside the public eye.
The musical numbers were wonderful. "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" was fantastic. Peter Travers claimed Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor's voices were "barely serviceable," but I beg to differ. McGregor has a gorgeous warm tenor well-suited to any romantic lead in a musical theatre production and, while Kidman pales in comparison, she sounds pretty damn good for an untrained singer. Plus, it also must be taken into account that her character was not *supposed* to sound like La Divina. She was a courtesan by trade, who just happened to have a half-decent voice.
The Moulin, itself, was a fantasyland. Sets and costumes throughout this film were phenomenal - I felt as though I had been literally catapulted into an absinthe-dream of 1900 rather than 1900, itself. Which, I believe, was Lurhmann's intention, and it worked wonderfully.
The middle portions of the film were easily the best. The "Elephant Love Medley" was just plain cute, sweet, and funny, and Kidman's rendition of "One Day I'll Fly Away" was exquisitely poignant, especially with the glittering lights of the Moulin in the background. The camera seemed to zip through their affair, however, and that took away from the emotional effect.
Out of the entire film, there were two scenes that were carved into my mind as brilliant. One was the "Tango de Roxanne" - absolutely positively riveting. Gorgeous editing job, intercutting between the incredibly sexy tango and the scene with the Duke and Satine. The entire sequence, ending with Satine's attempted departure from the Moulin immediately elevated the film from the "rather good" status it had prior to those scenes.
The other was the entire production of "Spectacular Spectacular" - aptly named. I was stunned by the sheer visual beauty of the show, and the scene with Satine and Christian (that Lurhmann obviously pulled almost verbatim from "La Traviata") had me literally in tears. *That* was the chemistry between Kidman and McGregor. *That* was what this film should and could have been!! "Come What May" was equally gorgeous, and Lurhmann could have easily just ended the film there.
S P O I L E R
Satine's death scene was overdone. It would have been so much more effective if she had died offscreen, rather than resorting to the rather cliched "I will always be with you" that seems to haunt every death scene of every film.
In all, "Moulin Rouge" was a film with the potential to be a masterpiece. I will be seeing it again, definitely, for those scenes I loved, but it was not the film I anticipated for five months. Perhaps I expected too much from the photographs and the music. Perhaps I expected the original version before it fell through the shredding machine known as editing.
I daresay I will wait until it comes out on DVD and maybe those scenes I wanted will appear in the "Deleted Scenes" section.