An Incandiferous Spectacular Spectacular!

Rating: 10/10 (17 November 2002)

First, my summary :
"Moulin Rouge!" is a brilliant surrealist assemblage/collage, grand music, beautiful cinematography. Deserves to be considered one of the great movies ever.
And now the nitty gritty bitties :
The first time I saw this, I enjoyed it.
The second time I didn't like it as much. "So so at best" was my thought.
Then one day while I was doing something else, I put it on as background and suddenly found myself paying attention. (Probably worth noting at this point that I've only seen it on TV - it takes a rare film to drag me into a theatre - but this is one film I'd love to see in a theatre.) Time to look it up in IMDB and read the comments and other information carefully. "Wow, a lot of people really like this, and a lot of people really HATE it."
I made a point to watch it again the next evening, put the sound through the stereo, turn the volume up a bit, turn lights down. Often enough when I do this, about five minutes into the film I get bored and go off to do something else. Not with "Moulin Rouge!" - I was hooked.
Since then I've seen it several times and every time I watch it, I find more to like - a bit more to dislike as well - but the stuff to like is by far the larger part.
The plot is hackneyed, the pacing uneven, the editing at times intrusive.

On the other hand ...
Think Max Ernst ("Une Semaine de Bonte'"), Salvadore Dali, even Picasso. Think Lewis Carroll, Reymond Queneau, James Joyce. And most especially, remember opera.
"Moulin Rouge!" is a surrealist collage, a mix of dreamscape and reality. Its an impressionist cityscape built almost of pointilliste scale cinematic (and audio) Legos -- symbols, allusions, quotes, archetypes, a dash of postmodern sensibility. Its an operatic (spectacular!) spectacular with its own leitmotifs, and as (often enough) in opera, its not the story that matters most.
Luhrmann presides over the production with vision and discipline. What sometimes looks like a mess on first viewing reveals itself (usually -- there are some exceptions) on closer consideration to be a very deliberately constructed stew -- filled with detail and allusion. Musically, we often hear the shortsighted say "None of the music is original" -- but why should that be a bad thing? By using music we know, Luhrmann gets to play off our associations of one piece against another, of music against performer, and of music against visual. Think Zidler doing "Like a Virgin", or the Paris toffs with "Teen Spirit".
You can almost imagine Luhrmann taking a favored collection of films (and cartoons), music and other bits of cultural detritus and cutting it all up and heaping it up, then taking out bits as he comes to them and putting them all together into a whole. Luhrmann's vision combines a very carefully planned visual style, an equally carefully planned musical score, some wondrous choreography, an oddly wonderful sense of humour and, well, lots more. He builds from these pieces a whole that is brilliant, coherent, compelling, funny and wholly his own.
And to top it off, its a whole pile of fun.
Watch for the allusions - the moon from the Lumiere brothers is the most obvious from film, but there are many more. I think you could do a final exam for a film course by showing a ten minute segment from this film (almost at random) and asking students to note down all the films referred to.
And watch for the stuff that just flashes by. I don't have a DVD player, but am tempted to get one almost this movie alone -- there are several things I'd like to look at very slowly to see if what I think is happening is really happening.
A final note - "The Roxanne Tango". Gosh. Wow. Speechless.