Starring: Ewan McGregor, Nicole Kidman, John Leguizamo, Jim Broadbent and Richard Roxburgh
Directed by: Baz Luhrmann
Moulin Rouge! unashamedly embraces the flamboyant- director Baz Luhrmann pulls out all stops, creating a non-stop barrage on the senses which is used to elegantly clothe a cliched romance. Nicole Kidman, in one of her two much-praised performance of 2001 is dazzling and breathtaking as Satine, the beautiful star of the famed Moulin Rouge who has the Parisian male population reveling at her feet. She boldy proclaims that her love is for sale to the highest bidder, that is, until penniless writer Ewan McGregor (who's the glue that hold the film together) appears and promptly sweeps her off her feet, showing her the power of a love that costs nothing.
The movie starts with Luhrmann's bizarre take on the infamous Moulin Rouge Can-Can that seems incoherant and rather distasteful until the viewer becomes accustomed to the film's odd sensibilities and relentless editing style. But once we know for sure that Nicole and Ewan's characters have fallen madly in love (demonstrated by a sequence of the couple dancing on the clouds above Paris), the movie's pace begins to pick up, taking us deeper and deeper into the glittery but shallow world of the Moulin Rouge until it reaches it's brilliant, tragic crescendo and the brightly painted civilization collapses into a barren heap.
The dance sequences are beautiful, dazzling and entrancing; the opening Can-Can number with the introduction of Satine, the Hindu-inspired grand finale and Le Tango de Roxanne are all highlights of the film and are breathless musical cinema and its ambitious and flashy best. They redefine the traditional dance number, at the same time breathing new life into a genre that had been long thought dead. It was a daring move on Luhrmann's part to not only attempt to pull off a musical in these jaded post-modern times when such silliness is scorned, but doubly daring to take a famous and celebrated fixture of modern history and completely reinvent it. It is all soutterly ridiculous, but it works- and works wonderfully and memorably well!
Moulin Rouge! reaches for new heights, which I find refreshing and exhilerating. It's highly flawed, but one of the strangest and most unexpected movies you'll come across in commerical American cinema from the last few years. Time seems to have no real meaning, the cutting between several storylines swirl you round and round until you are dizzy and blinded by color and song. The relentless, in-your-face style takes getting used to, but once you do it's one visual feast with just enough substance to make for a satisfying, rather bizarre, but totally unforgettable movie experience.
(Color, in English)
Originally written: December 23, 2001
Revised: June 30, 2003
