Intentional kitsch = the opposite of emotion

Rating: Null/10 (26 January 2002)

I admire all the hard work that went into this big fancy movie. It looks like it was expensive and complicated to make, and all the designers and actors do a really impressive job. Good for them.
But this movie is, simply, wrong. If they made Casablanca and instead of Humphrey Bogart, they had a chimpanzee playing Rick, we'd point to the chimp and tell the director, "No, sorry. You screwed up. That chimp shouldn't be here. It's a mistake and now your movie doesn't work. You have to scrap this all and start again." Baz Luhrmann needs to scrap this movie (and 'Strictly Ballroom,' too, incidentally) and start again.
The problem is this: there has never been a movie so exuberantly kitschy (or do I mean campy?) as Moulin Rouge Exclamation Point - but there's already some trouble brewing in the whole idea of doing something to be INTENTIONALLY outrageously kitschy. When outlandishly dumb things happen in this movie (Boing! Whoo!), we can't chuckle and say, "oh my god, can you believe how ridiculous that was?" because of COURSE we can believe it - it's the whole point, after all. If we were watching a REAL old musical, and someone started speaking the lyrics to a song, we might have something to chuckle at - what naivete! what sweetly, pathetically sincere absurdity - but in this in-your-face movie, the dumb-ness is just part of the game, and so it's hard to see it as anything but...dumb. I guess you have to suspend your disbelief - disbelief not that the story is real, but that the movie is naive.
But that pales in comparison to the real problem, which is that once we're thinking, "how outrageous and ridiculous this crazy show is!" we are at the diametric opposite point on the emotional circle (as it turns out, emotions come on a circle - thought you should know) to being moved by anything. When Baz et. al. come out shouting that this is a movie about Truth, Beauty, Nutmeg and Whatever, I'm thinking, "I hear ya - Boing, Whoo!, Truth!, Beauty!, I gotcha, buddy." But then as it goes on I get this creepy feeling that he really DOES think it's about Truth, Beauty, Whatever. Good lord. If this is a movie about people's emotions, where are the people? Where, even, are the puppets to represent people? All I see are bits of cultural flotsam being thrown against each other to create sparks of camp - a pretty empty show at best.
What really pains me is that so many people (people I thought were my friends! people I used to respect!) are of the same mind as Baz, and eat this movie up. They're saying, "It's so MOVING when Rick puts Ilsa on the plane and doesn't go with her - and the monkey was so FUNNY!" No. Either this is a movie about a funny monkey, or it's a love story. It can't be both - I can draw a diagram on paper to show you why if you don't believe me. I KNOW there are people reading this right now thinking, "he just doesn't get it - the whole point of this movie is that it uses a veneer of crazy kitschiness to get at the real live beating heart of emotion," but they are, in fact, wrong. If you find yourself moved by the hackneyed nonsense that serves as the plot of Moulin Rouge(!), I'm happy for you, I really am - but that means you're absolutely not entitled to pretend that you understand the point of kitsch. Unless you really don't, and you just love it all at face value! God help us if all these Moulin Rouge! fans think the beyond-infantile 'Boing's and 'Whoo!'s are actual comedy as opposed to meta-comedy. Maybe it all just RESEMBLES kitsch, but it's been assembled by a total naive, who really doesn't know the difference. A chilling thought - but having seen the movie, I could believe it.
If you thought this movie was about love, you (and Baz) have been so deeply blinded by a post-modern world that you don't realize that to move from irony to emotion, you go DOWN a level in manic allusiveness, not UP. It's just a fact.
One more time: "The Sound of Music" is a song about something, from a musical. "The Sound of Music" as it appears in 'Moulin Rouge!' is just a floating fragment of culture used as a prop to make a joke that is so corny and childish as to be only excusable by the idea that it is the joke itself that is being made fun of - and thus is not a song, is not about anything, and is not in a musical.
No amount of WILD FLAMBOYANT PRODUCTION and FAST CUTTING can disguise the fact that this movie has a chimp in it - or, really, that this chimp has a movie around it. And a flimsy one at that.