Spectacular, Spectacular!

Rating: 9/10 (23 January 2002)

MOULIN ROUGE! (2001) Rating: 9/10
Director and co-writer (with Craig Pearce) Baz Luhrmann describes the style he brought to the Australian dance flick Strictly Ballroom and his underrated take on William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet as "red curtain theatricality". He likes to deal with familiar types of stories (so the audience knows how it will end) taking place in sort of a heightened reality, with plenty of devices reminding the audience that they're watching a movie. Moulin Rouge! is a perfect example of that. It's not interested in the banal and the realistic, it's Cinema!!, with a capital 'C' and plenty of exclamation points! Music! Flying colors! Dancing! Emotions set free! Slapstick! LOVE! The red curtain opens (literally) and then we're off for one wild ride, a rocky electric cancan boogie playing over a love rollercoaster, as seen through the lenses of a filmmaker with a vision equal parts Méliès, Technicolor 1950s musicals and MTV.
It's quite overwhelming at first, but in a good way. Luhrmann's frenetic back and forth camerawork puts you in the same state of mind as Christian as he enters the Moulin Rouge for the first time. On one side powdered girls are doing their thing, chanting the "Voulez-Vous couchez avec moi?" chorus from "Lady Marmelade", while across the way a bunch of men in tuxedos are emulating Kurt Cobain and proclaiming "Here we are now, entertain us...", meanwhile Zigler is screaming "Because you can can-can!" on Fatboy Slim's electronic beats... And then Satine floats down on a trapeze crooning "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friends" and takes everybody's breath away... The men's, Christian's... Ours.
That's another thing; it's good to be able to craft energetic, entertaining musical numbers, but there's the danger to end up with a futile, purposeless costume revue. This never happens here because, as familiar and melodramatic as the story can be, it still involves us completely. We really feel for these passionate lovers doomed to hide their affair. When we see Satine for the first time, we fall in love with her along with Christian, and we root for him, for them, through the rest of the film. The delightfully twisted musical numbers that punctuate their tale aren't gratuitous but integral to the drama. Most every important declaration is made through song, be it Christian belting out Elton John's "Your Song" ("How wonderful life is while you're in the world...") or Satine serenading him with "Come What May" (one of the movie's few originals, and a great one at that - expect an Oscar nomination), or the both of them discoursing about love with lyrics from famous songs from The Beatles, Kiss, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Joe Cocker, Whitney Houston. Plus, not only to the songs fit in thematically, they're also reinvented in original ways. The Police's "Roxane" becomes a tango, Madonna's "Like a Virgin" becomes a show tune...

Then there's the outrageous sets and costumes, the frantic choreography, the endless variety of camera angles and editing tricks... And above all, love, as communicated by Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman in what could be career peaks for both. Kidman is just lovable, sexy, warm and goofy, nothing like the icy bombshell she once appeared to be. McGregor is at the other end of the spectrum from diving into toilets, all charm and idealism, love obsessed writer, blue-eyed dreamer... And when put together, extraordinary chemistry erupts, they just gel together, they BELONG with one another! And they can sing too! Who knew these two had such nice voices? They're nicely surrounded by a cast of enjoyably caricatural supporting characters, from John Leguizamo's high-on-absinthe dwarf to Jim Broadbent's life of the party burly man and Richard Roxburgh' moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash of a villain.
Moulin Rouge! is what film lovers have been waiting for all year. Here's a movie that makes you giddy with joy and eager to see it again and again. Spectacular Spectacular indeed!