Oh La La Land...

Rating: 8/10 (4 March 2017)

When I was a student, our marketing teacher told us an anecdote about one of our predecessors who, after finishing school, started quite an unusual business; he bought grants for operating licenses, allowing him to improve a brand and its value before selling it with a capital gain. One of his first clients was the owner of a cabaret whose fading reputation made him lose money and customers and needed a real rejuvenation treatment. It was the Moulin Rouge.
Legend has it that, once he owned the rights, the secretary of a young Australian director called him, asking for the permission to use the name for the title and the setting of a movie. Needless to say that it boosted the 'Moulin Rouge' image for a whole new century and our young businessman made enough money not to need another job. I don't know how much has been amplified by the passing of years, but I love to think of fate as a crazy Can-Can dancer with a perfect timing; a pivotal business at a pivotal moment of the history of musicals, in fact of movie-making.
Wikipedia states that "Moulin Rouge!" was the first musical to be nominated for Best Picture after ten years, the last being "Beauty and the Beast". While Disney's classic is a great musical, the novelty of its nomination had more to do with its status as an animated movie, so while not disregarding it, I would say that Baz Lurhmann's "Moulin Rouge!" is a mini-milestone as the first live-action musical in twenty-two years since Bob Fosse's "All That Jazz". When it came out, the "love-letter-to-Hollywood" wasn't 'all that jazz' yet, the film took everyone off guard, shook up the conventions of the genre with such gusto that it might have undermined the chances to win the Best Picture Oscar. The more conventional "Chicago" would, over such heavy contenders as two epics and a holocaust movie.
There wouldn't be one streak of ten years without a musical, but "Les Miserables" didn't win the coveted prize and recently front-runner "La La Land", was knocked out at the last minute by "Moonlight", so maybe the love for musicals have faded a little, and viewers are more attached to conventional forms of storytelling, as long as the stories are unconventional. Maybe that's the problem of musicals: they use unconventional narratives stories that can't wow our cynical eyes. And maybe the reason why I was so ecstatic after "Chicago" was because the story was still enjoyable without the music. "Moulin Rouge!" uses a clever exclamation mark to distance itself from John Huston's eponymous film and emphasizing its treatment of the iconic place, but beyond all the glitz and extravaganza the film is wrapped in, the story is rather conventional and its notability film is mostly dependent on all the choreographic achievements and frenetic editing.
Indeed, "Moulin Rouge!"' plot can be summed up in one paragraph: a struggling writer named Chrsitian (Ewan McGregor) falls in love with Moulin Rouge's sensation, the courtesan named Satine (Nicole Kidman) but their romance is undermined by the sneaky mustached Duke of Monroth (Richard Boxborgh). So, they use the process of writing a spectacular spectacle (deliberate pleonasm) as a decoy to their forbidden love but the Duke's jealousy and Satine's illness (she's suffering, actually dying, from tuberculosis) escalates to the obligatory emotional climax. The story is well-acted but its plot is like a clothesline where to hang musical numbers, but that's not to diminish the appeal of the film because it is in a class of its own, on that level and one's got to hand it to Lurhmann to have opened the streak of musicals with possibly the least conventional one.
Lurhmann was the son of a dance choreographer and theater owner and like Bob Fosse who was a dancer; you can tell that it injected a real musical instinct in the young director. The film is a dazzling and vertiginous series of musical vignettes directed by a majestic ringmaster played by Jim Broadbent in an unprecedented role since Joel Grey in "Cabaret". There's not a single shot lasting more than ten seconds. It is a spectacle that paradoxically endorses the codes of musicals as tragic romances but that invent something that appeal to the MTV and clip generation. The result is odd and avant-garde and might disorient the fans of the more traditional form of storytelling. But don't get it wrong, this is not the kind of musical that would have looked better in Broadway, if anything, it highlights the status of movies as a unique way of storytelling.
Indeed, you can't have such dramatic changes of costumes, such heavy jump cuts in a play, but here, they're indispensable for the film's hyperbolic vitality. The editing of is one of the most rhythmically fact you'll ever witness but it's a double-edge sword. The paradox is that the film might not hold up in theaters, many users said they left the audience because they've had an overdose so maybe this is a film that benefit from a viewing, one where you have a remote control. Still, if you're patient enough to get to the end, you will see that the film is not without a strong emotional resonance. Maybe that wouldn't have been possible had it featured traditional can-cans and a gloomier Toulouse-Lautrec (unlike Leguizamo's) but it couldn't be just a retread of the Paris we know.
Believe me, as someone who lived in Paris and not far from the Pigalle quarter where the cabaret is set, I knew there was an eternal gap between the Paris you imagine and the real one, Paris is never as dazzling as in the realm of our imagination and what can be more imaginative than a medley of songs that go from "Queen" to Kurt Cobain in Paris' 1900. It's crazy, sick irreverent and grotesque but hey, for the sake of entertainment no holds are to be barred.