Moulin Rouge

Let me explain.

First of all, you should be aware that none of the trailers, ads, or publicity for this film will give you any idea of what it's really like. They appear to be selling Moulin Rouge as an epic romance set in Paris at the turn of the last century. Every one of those things is a lie. For instance, this movie is not set in Paris, or in 1900; it is set in a fantasy landscape which was no doubt once inspired by illustrations and photographs of an actual place but has now left them all very far behind. The world of Moulin Rouge is flamboyantly, outrageously, aggressively unreal; and so are all the people and events contained therein.

Like the landscape itself, the plot of the film is built on the collage or pastiche model. Everything in this film originated somewhere else--from the songs (almost all of which are immediately recognizable as pop tunes from the 1970s and 1980s) to the choreography (which includes references to many of the great movie musicals of the past, especially Singin' in the Rain) to the plot itself. Nicole Kidman plays Satine, a high-class courtesan who wants to be taken seriously as an actress. She falls for Christian (Ewan MacGregor), a penniless writer starving in the proverbial garrett who is immediately smitten with her upon seeing her perform at the Moulin Rouge, a den of sin and iniquity presided over by Harry Ziegler (Jim Broadbent), a Satanic, nightmarish, evil-clown-from-hell with a heart of gold. Unfortunately, Satine and Ziegler are both in the power of the rich and vaguely effeminate Duke, who is willing to invest his millions in the play that will make Christian and his bohemian friends famous and Satine a real actress--as long as Satine becomes his exclusive property. Love and money battle it out for the rights to the soul and body of a beautiful woman. It's a very, very old story, and when you throw in the fact that Satine is dying of consumption, it becomes clear that Luhrmann has raided not only musical comedy (Satine sings "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" not once, but twice) but opera (most obviously Verdi's La Traviata, but also Puccini's La Boheme). The often overwhelming but always interesting visual style emphasizes the collage structure--perspectives are skewed, intercutting is frequent, many different kinds of filter are called into play, and in general one has the impression that somewhere in L.A. there is a group of film editors who are slowly, painfully recovering from a collective nervous breakdown. The pace is frenetic, disorienting, and often confusing; most of the time it is very hard to tell where these characters are, and not infrequently it's hard to tell what they're doing.

Being derivative is, of course, something that a lot of Hollywood movies have in common. What's remarkable about Moulin Rouge is that derivativeness is its entire purpose and raison d'etre. The film is not so much an epic romance as an elaborately constructed and highly intelligent send-up of epic romance, at least as represented through popular culture. Much of the humor comes from watching the characters mouth the words of some of the most banal and vapid pop songs of our generation as if they are speaking deep, profound, and world-changing truths. "Love is a many-splendored thing," says the painfully earnest Christian, with a straight face. "Love lifts us up where we belong! All you need is love!" Watching Christian capture Satine's heart by singing Elton John's "Your Song" is nothing short of hilarious; I can't tell you about the two most brilliant uses of contemporary pop songs because their impact derives from that initial moment of sudden, flabbergasted recognition. "Oh my God, that's not...oh my God, it is!"

Taking a bunch of unrelated modern songs and writing a movie around them is actually not a new technique; in fact, it brings us back to the traditional Hollywood musical era, where musicals got made by handing a writer a list of recent hit songs and saying, "Write me a movie that uses all of these." Musicals have always had to be self-conscious to a certain extent; it's impossible to achieve natural realism in a genre that requires the characters to drop what they're doing and burst into song at frequent intervals. But this is why most of these movie musicals have always been comedies. Romantic comedy has trained us to be able to laugh at the cheesiness of it all whiel still empathizing with the characters. We can chuckle knowingly at the hokiness of the artificially engineered happy ending and still be genuinely happy to see a weeping Kathy Selden finally turn around and run back onto the stage and into Don Lockwood's arms (a moment from Singin' In The Rain which is cited in the final scene of Moulin Rouge). What works less well, for me, is doing all of this self-conscious self-parody in a film that wants to be tragic. As long as I was allowed to laugh at the plot and the characters and all the pop culture in-jokes, I was fine. But halfway through the film the movie asks us to start taking the Christian/Satine romance seriously; and I couldn't go there. It had by that point been made so blindingly obvious to me that both of these characters are cardboard cutouts being manipulated by puppeteers that I was unable to make the emotional investment that would have allowed me to cry over the tragic denouement. Since the whole joke of the movie is based on the assumption that all of this claptrap about love is essentially meaningless, it's a little much to have the movie suddenly trying to convince us that it's meaningful.

This is one of the things that annoys me about the publicity, which is selling this movie as a straight love story. "This film is about beauty, truth, freedom, and above all love." Actually, it's about pop music, MTV, hotties, and above all, outfits. Nicole Kidman does look good in the clothes, I have to say; and I now finally understand what all the fuss is about Ewan MacGregor. Not only can he actually sing--as opposed to Kidman, who can acquit herself decently but to whom you would not sit down and listen for her own sake--but he manages to combine vulnerable, tremulous sincerity with a kind of deadpan humor which almost--almost--made the whole thing work.

So did I like it? I don't know. To me, the most impressive thing about this film is that it got made. I enjoyed trying to imagine the pitch meeting. "OK, it's like you take La Traviata, The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen, Gentlement Prefer Blondes, Madonna, Sting, Elton John, and Hindi pop, cut them all up into little pieces, put them all in a centrifuge, and then after it's all been spun out you peel off the paper it's all splattered onto, and that's the movie!" "Sure, Baz. We'll call you." The fact that a movie this weird could be a mainstream release warms the cockles of my meta-lovin' heart, especially since its originality is, ironically, the fact that the film does not contain a single original element. But I didn't feel any emotional connection to it, and I don't see myself watching it over and over. Although I do have the soundtrack.