Maudlin Rouge -- "More is less. Much, much less."

Rating: Null/10 (2 June 2001)

In the art world, they use the expression `less is more', and MOULIN ROUGE is the best example of `more is less -- much, much less.' They went to the trouble and expense of creating lushly detailed sets and costumes, then edited the damn thing so fast you can't take in a bit of it. Meanwhile this jumble hangs on a tedious farce about hiding a romance from a rich suitor who not only invests in their musical but owns the soul of every person in the joint. It would have been more interesting (and believable) if the Duke had not been so Snidely-Whiplash-totally-dastardly (Muwahahahahhh, *cue: twirl moustache*), and if the courtesan had been torn between two attractive suitors. It was very uncharacteristic for such a hardened woman to so easily lose her heart.
Now frenetic wackiness and cartoonish camp could be forgivable as light entertainment, but this flick also demands us to care about its characters when they weren't even passable soap opera material. "A love that will last forever" -- right. These cardboard cut-outs can sing about love all they want, but when they scream in my face to care about their tragic lives, I shout back, `maudlin!' And when the end credit states this film is about Beauty, Truth, and above all Love  well, my wretching precludes shouting out anything at all. All this was bitterly disappointing, because the movie had opened hopefully with a full-screen proscenium and curtain and a small (life-size) conductor below, gesticulating while the 20th Century Fox anthem blared away like an overture... then it successfully transitioned into the past, and the first few impressive show-stoppers hinted that the historical Moulin Rouge was about to be transformed into a metaphor for our modern entertainments (hence a reason for our contemporary music transported back a hundred years). But instead of a witty statement about ourselves, we're given a B-grade melodrama. Hmmm, maybe unwittingly the film HAS made a statement about the 3-ring circus known as modern media.
There's also Revisionism gone wild: Toulouse Lautrec, genius of painting, is thoughtlessly converted into a lisping playwright/clown reminiscent of The Boob from `Yellow Submarine'. (Aww, isn't he cute.) Dammit, he wasn't a dwarfish court jester, but a real person with passions and pleasures and fears and fancies like the rest of us. Oh yeh, this is also yet-another flick where everyone in Paris talks with a British accent.
Music: 8/10 (Good voices from Kidman & McGregor; only devalued by a penchant to continuously repeat the wretched `Your Song.')...... Set design and effects: 10/10...... Mind-numbing editing that destroyed the set design and effects: 2/10...... Story: 1/10 (Luhrmann is no Puccini.)..... Overall: 3/10 -- a beautiful-looking disaster that severely p***ed me off.