A Love-It-Or-Hate-It Experience

Rating: 9/10 (3 October 2012)

"Moulin Rouge!" is a romantic Jukebox musical that tells the story of a young, English poet/writer, Christian, who falls in love with the terminally-ill star of the Moulin Rouge, cabaret actress and courtesan Satine. It stars Nicole Kidman and Ewan Mcgregor together with Jim Broadbent,Richard Roxburgh,John Leguizamo,Jacek Koman and Caroline O'Connor.The film was loosely based on the opera Orpheus in the Underworld It was directed, produced, and co-written by Baz Luhrmann.
Christian leaves behind his bourgeois father during the French belle époque of the late 1890's to seek his fortunes in the bohemian underworld of Montmartre, Paris. Christian meets the absinthe- and alcohol-addicted artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who introduces him to a world of sex, drugs, music, theater, and the scandalous dance known as the cancan, all at the Moulin Rouge, a decadent dance hall, brothel, and theater that's the brainchild of Harold Zidler. Christian also meets and falls into a tragically doomed romance with the courtesan Satine, who becomes the star of the play he's writing, which parallels the couple's romance and utilizes rock music from a century later.
This film is a tour de force of artifice, a dazzling pastiche of musical and visual elements at the service of a blatantly artificial story.It is all style, all giddy, over-the-top spectacle but nevertheless, it's also daring in its vision and wildly original.It is overall a "love-it-or- hate-it experience" for the viewer.