Moulin Rouge

Director Baz Luhrmann last gave us "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet," which took the Bard's ancient words and stuck them in a modern setting. Some of us wanted to give the film back, feeling that the direction was overstylized and almost self-congratulatory in its virtuosity. Now he gives us "Moulin Rouge," whose characters hail from an imagined Paris of a hundred years ago and express themselves primarily through songs written in the last twenty years, by people who were not previously associated with Baz Luhrmann. Also, the actors sing all the songs themselves. Also the direction is even more cataclysmically virtuosic than before, as every effect in the Book of Stylization is trotted out for our delectation.

Yet "Moulin Rouge" succeeds at what it attempts, which is not to tell grand truths or illuminate our thoughts with well-chosen words but to capture a certain delirious atmosphere that has existed at every point in history in the minds of our artists. You would expect certain problems to crop up in an undertaking like this, and Luhrmann is not talented enough to avoid any of them. But he and his cast are talented enough to put so much fevered, frenzied energy into making their errors that the resulting movie almost transcends them completely.

Still, it's hard to expect much from the beginning of this film. This first half-hour introduces what must be the second-oldest plot, that of a young, handsome, penniless man named Christian (Ewan McGregor) falling in love with a beautiful prostitute, Satine (Nicole Kidman), the Sparkling Diamond of the den of iniquity that is the Moulin Rouge. Christian is a writer, however, and he and his buddies (including Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, overplayed by John Leguizamo) wish to be on the receiving end of a commission to stage a show in the Moulin Rouge, starring Satine. This will require money from a Duke (Richard Roxburgh, resembling David Spade in a distracting manner), who takes a shine to the production so long as Satine will shine for him, preferably in his bedchambers. It's true love versus cash rules, and you know how that conflict normally plays out in the movies.

No, what makes those first thirty minutes exceptional is the fact that Elton John's "Your Song" is used in the courtship of Christian and Satine (warning! name symbolism!), and inflated way beyond its original proportions into a sweeping orchestral aria - sung, remember by a somewhat timorous Ewan McGregor. Your feelings about this will no doubt depend on your feelings about "Your Song," but my feeling is that the lyrics cannot survive the endless repetition they undergo here. There's also a kind of medley of love-song catchphrases ("Give me just one more night," "I will always looove youuuu") which will make you laugh or cringe, and probably both.

This reliance on popular songs is a crutch for artistic laziness. Luhrmann has spoken of the "immediate emotional connection" familiar songs can make, but what he doesn't say is that he's not willing to take the risk of trying to create an emotional connection from scratch. Especially when Luhrmann is using fragments of songs, the whole concept feels slapdash and laughably artificial.

But during those first thirty minutes, we also hear "Lady Marmalade" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" sung in breathless counterpoint by a cast of dozens, which is certainly something you don't hear every day. More to the point, the scene which features these songs is a triumph of energy over sense, with the camera moving like it was attached to a remote-controlled plane, lighting that changes like a calculated kaleidoscope, editing that jumps around with no purpose but motion and every actor hamming it up as high as it can possibly go. And it works. There is simply no way to resist much of this film: it drives everything as hard as it can, it tosses off sense in favor of sensation, it pulses with a life and will and kinetic madness that, when you can ignore the songs, are tremendously seductive.

As the film goes on, Luhrmann's direction does not slack off, and the script gradually sheds some of the more intrusive popular affectations. McGregor and Kidman buy into the thrusting momentum of the film, and (in a crucial success) look pretty as hell while they do it. Their courtship and love is thrilling and sexy at once, and once you've been sucked into it Luhrmann makes it impossible to leave, because he never lets up. When he does stop the movement for a moment, it's normally to look at Kidman's face, which is a good idea given her limpid blue eyes, expressive lips and noble, collected demeanor at rest. These pauses make the energy of the rest of the film easier to appreciate.

And finally, it is a real relief that the main love song, "Come What May," was actually written for the film, and does not have any of those intrusive immediate emotional connections pre-attached to it. It may not be popular, but dammit, it's honest.

"Moulin Rouge" is not for everyone, obviously; it takes a certain appetite for whirling and zooming and diving and climbing to enjoy it. If you don't have that appetite, the whole imaginative edifice will crumble before your eyes: what's riveting will become silly, what's energetic will become wasteful. But if you do have that appetite, you definitely want to check out what's behind the red curtain.

SOMEONE DOESN'T UNDERSTAND HIS OWN TERMINOLOGY

"In Moulin Rouge, our contact with the audience, our device to awaken is the experience of music, or simply put, song. Yes, Moulin Rouge is fundamentally a musical, perhaps an opera, but primarily a story told through song." — Baz Luhrmann [in the press kit], causing music teachers' brains to explode

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