Moulin Rouge film review

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MOULIN ROUGE

I'm not sure how the real Paris of 1900 looked, but if it was anything like the Paris in Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge then I sure wish I'd lived there. Luhrmann has created an intoxicating and vivid world inhabited by artists, performers and circus freaks dressed in the most elegant and extravagant costumes. It's a place where inhibition is frowned upon, excess is revered and the distinction between reality and theatricality is blurred. It's a make believe world with no rules to which the viewers have to submit themselves unreservedly to garner its full delights.

With his previous films William Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet and Strictly Ballroom Luhrmann exhibited his penchant for lurid and bold filmmaking, but with Moulin Rouge he has taken his flights of fantasy to new heights. To have characters set within the baudy and bohemian turn of the century Paris suddenly bursting into refrains of Elton John's Your Song is a leap few other filmmakers would attempt, let alone complete, but it's to Luhrmann's credit that he succeeds magnificently.

The desire to make Moulin Rouge appear more as a staged musical than a movie is established from the start. Lush curtains open to reveal a conductor, before we're swept over a painted set of Paris to the window of Christian (Ewan McGregor), an impoverished writer who sits at his trusty Underwood and reflects on how he'd come to Paris in search of freedom, beauty, truth and love and found the latter in the form of the beautiful and tragic courtesan Satine (Nicole Kidman), a dancer at the Moulin Rouge. That this is accompanied to the tune of Nat King Cole's Nature Boy only endorses the fact, if we didn't know it already, that to question credulity would be too churlish and make the next two hours interminable and absurd.

From this auspicious beginning we head back in time one year to when the newly arrived Christian, anxious to make his mark, happens upon a theatre troupe comprised of various colourful characters including Toulouse Lautrec (John Leguizamo) and a narcoleptic Argentinian (Jacek Koman). Struggling to find a fitting song for their forthcoming 'Spectacular Spectacular' revue at the Moulin Rouge, the hesitant Christian starts singing "It's a little bit funny, this feeling inside. I'm not one of those who can easily hide." The smile of the troupe at having discovered such a talent is matched by that of the audience the moment they recognise the words as being the opening lines to Your Song.