Definite 'Love-It-Or-Loathe-It' Territory

Rating: 8/10 (22 September 2001)

There are those moments in the film so excruciatingly embarrassing that you quite literally squirm in your seat in discomfort. Similarly, there are sequences that make the hairs stand up on your arms, your skin turn to gooseflesh, and transport you so far from the cinema that you can forget about all the gibbering, squawking 13 year olds behind you. Jam-packed with a dozen kinds of digital jiggery-pokery and some of the most incredible and overblown set design this side of Bollywood, the movie is like a 2hr MTV clip designed by Pierre et Gilles (and that's no bad thing). Okay, so there's very little story, nothing in the way of character arcs or subplot and midpoint climaxes, but there IS lots of colour, dancing and jaw dropping spectacle. Kidman and McGregor give excellent performances given the context, she a modern day Gilda (but where's the piano?), he all grinning naivety (with an excellent voice). The music is brilliantly mixed, at times several songs blending together into an indefinable, yet oddly familiar whole. Highlights, for me -- the duel/exchange of love song lyrics mutating into Bowie's 'Heroes' atop a gilded elephant, and the excellent tango/Roxanne sequence. Definitely a love it or loathe it film. Indifference unlikely.