Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

. . . How can I tell you how bad this film is? It is not in MOULIN ROUGE's cynical technical virtuosity, not in the exhausting, exhausted performances of the players (at least one of whom was seriously injured in the effort), nor even in the foolishly inappropriate choice of music and lyrics (especially as dialogue). The dreadfulness, which it shares with nine out of ten "big films" today, is in the amount of talent and money which has been poured into a juvenile concept that no old-line studio head would have approved in the most crass Hollywood heyday. Five years in the making, MOULIN ROUGE is so bad that it has an outside chance of being a minor blockbuster in the Summer season.

MOULIN ROUGE reminds me of a show I wrote with a guy named Ray Metzinger at Kent State in the early 1950's. Chosen and funded as the "original student musical" of its year, we rejected theater and musical faculty advice, in order to make a satirical-romantic-musical comedy parody masterpiece. In our production of "Who Cares?" that halcyon spring, we had a feckless, idealistic hero who became lost in an imaginary Morocco searching for "bunklenuts." There was an exotic princess in the power a sultan named Abu-ben-Bellyhang. We fielded harem girls (one of whom, Kathy Totter, claimed to be the niece of Noir Star Audrey Totter), dancing Eskimos, you name it. The music (the best thing in the show) was by one Jack L. Swan, while Ray and I -- in our vainglory -- crafted the lyrics.

It was DEEP, man!

I don't know where any of the cast or crew is now, but I remember the show fondly because it was so heady to create it. The 38 year-old Australian Writer-Director Bazmark Anthony Luhrmann must still have some of that imperious youthful hubris. "Who Cares?" was much more terrible than MOULIN ROUGE, but then, we didn't have 56 million dollars to waste on it.

MOULIN ROUGE, made in far-off Australia, builds on an ingenious spanning-comparison of corrupt Post-Empire Paris with the Gilded Age of the today's New World Order, and contains so many retro-references to popular music, movie and theatrical arts that it would take twenty pages to list them all. Forgive me (or thank me) if I list but a few of these incongruous, gratuitous details in the rest of my piece.

The movie begins (and ends) with a screen-filling red velvet theater curtain (a symbol) being pulled aside, the conductor of a pit orchestra visible at the bottom of the frame, rather like something Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (THE RED SHOES, 1948) might have chosen -- and did, for THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (1951). We are in a flickering, stylized Paris that pioneer movie-maker George Mellies could have imagined -- and did (THE ARTIST'S DREAM, 1898; VOYAGE TO THE MOON, 1902).

Our hero intones: "It was 1899, the summer of love . . ." The year 1899 -- fin d'siecle -- we get it -- or if not, we soon shall -- and immediately we think . . . 1899-1999 -- one hundred years. The Age of Jacques Offenbach -- The Age of Elton John. We get it! And then, we are exhorted to accept the puerile motto, "Truth, Beauty, Freedom -- and above all else -- Love!"

If you tire of these hyphenated analogies, think of how tired you may be of them after three hours of MOULIN ROUGE.

A zooming camera and lots special effects carry us, not for the last time, to a garret in Monmartre.

Against the advice of his father, a young English poet named Christian (played by Scots Ewan McGregor), a kind of Oscar Wilde in limbo, has come to Paris to create Pure Art. "The greatest thing/you'll ever learn/is just to love/and be loved in return." To Eden Ahbez's "Nature Boy," he pecks out the words, closely shot a la CITIZEN KANE, of his/ Ahbez's ode to Love (which we will see or hear, in a kaleidoscope of means, again and again and again throughout the movie). Looking remarkably fit for a man dying of dissipation, with less than two years to live, a caricature of dwarfish Artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo) appears. Like the Mad Hatter, he brings with him a group of unidentified Bohemian colleagues, who resemble TV's Lone Assassins. They immediately recognize genius. Christian is the man to realize Toulouse-Lautrec's play, a masterpiece entitled Spectacular Spectacular. But first, as in Alice in Wonderland, there is a "drink me," in this case the green licorice liqueur Absinthe.

By movie magic and cutting, led by a singing Green Fairy (Australian pop star Kylie Minoque), hallucinating no doubt from the Absinthe, we are transported to the Moulin Rouge. Built in Montmartre, The Moulin Rouge, like the large Elephant building behind it, was a hilltop leftover from the Universal Exhibition of 1889, which did much to transform Paris into the City we admire today.

In this home of Offenbach's Can-Can, our talented group mixes with a thousand top-hatted boulevardiers. Zidler (Jim Broadbent), a large red-bearded cherub, the impresario of The Moulin Rouge, proclaims the main attraction right in our faces. From the ceiling, Satine (Nicole Kidman), the star of this seminal lap-dance club, descends on a swing to join the Company of dancers, jugglers, etc. She is singing -- and rather well, too -- Rogers and Hammerstein's "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend." (It is one of two or three really good numbers in the film.)

Christian sees her and . . . well . . . you know.

McGregor and Kidman work hard to suggest a sudden electric circuit of infatuation. But here, and later, they are defeated by the razzle-dazzle editing, impressive but character destroying.

They gradually settle for parody.

[As the number climaxed in giant images of Satine, my mind wandered to a song idea which both Baz Luhrmann and my old tunes smith Jack L. Swan might have liked: "Girls Are a Diamond's Best Friend." At least, if they have the talent and beauty of Nicole Kidman.]

From that point, we plunge into the Camille of Alexandre Dumas, fils; or Puccini's Opera La Boheme; or (not quite) the recent post-modern musical, Rent; or a farce based on all three of these -- take your pick. The evil English Duke of Worcester (Richard Roxburgh) is also smitten with Satine. Zidler must juggle the right angles and hypotenuses of their love/commerce triangle in order to procure the Duke's financial support for Christian's version of Toulouse-Lautrec's Spectacular Spectacular, starring beauteous Satine.

The play, as projected, and hurriedly revised when necessary, is about an Indian Sitar player (Christian), who falls in love with a harem beauty (Satine), invoking the wrath of the Sultan (Zidler standing in for the Duke), but love will out -- as someone must have said, at least once, and in many ways, during the shooting of MOULIN ROUGE.

Zidler hides the Christian-Satine romance from the Duke, and excuses Satine's absences both to the Duke and to Christian. For Satine suffers from a common deadly disease of crowded 19th Century cities. She has "Consumption" (Tuberculosis). We see the evidence of the disease in extreme close-ups of beautiful blood-flecked lips, spotted handkerchiefs, or spattered pans. It gives us pause, however, amidst all the rip-rock romantic fantasies, to think of how reckless, unpleasant and dangerous it would be to make love to a person so afflicted. (No doubt, some critics will find a subtle reference to AID's . . . or Crack.)

The deadly, contagious disease does not prevent the lovers from having a tryst in Satine's boudoir, deep in the "belly" of the Elephant (building). As she melts from artifice to passion before Christian's ardor, they are lost in "The Elephant Medley," which includes The Beatles' "All You Need Is Love," U-2's "In the Name of Love," Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You," Joe Cocker's "Up Where We Belong," Cindi Lauper's "Time after Time," and Elton John's "Your Song." We can almost see Princess Diana rising, in the name of love, time after time, in the World where she belonged.

[By the way, much of the dialogue is just like the above pastiche.]

Broadbent's Zidler contributes a good number when he keeps the Duke away from the truth, while exercising their contract. With a towel substituting for a shawl, Zidler imitates Madonna in "Like a Virgin," describing the special quality Satine will offer the Duke, if the frenetic chap will just come across with enough money to open the show. The Duke, of course, holds out for getting the girl, not only in the show but in the flesh.

The climax rolls the spirit of everything that has been suggested earlier into a titanic Moulin Rouge-Gaite Parisienne-Broadway-Nashville-Hollywood -- indeed Bollywood -- production number come (sic) Victorian melodrama. All the characters are in play. And Baz must have thought, "What the hell?" He throws in a scarfaced minion of the Duke rampaging about with a large pistol -- like Billy Zane on James Cameron's lucrative floating disaster of several years ago.

Bazman Anthony Luhrmann proclaims MOULIN ROUGE the third of his "Red Curtain Trilogy." He says that the first, STRICTLY BALLROOM (1992), dealt with dance; the second, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO AND JULIET, with iambic pentameter; and in his latest extravaganza he polishes off music. He is nothing if not grandiose. But STRICTLY BALLROOM showed that his talent lay in staging choreography. When he tries to write stories, dialogue or direct actors in complex emotions, he is in trouble.

During a recent interview, Luhrmann moodily reflected that he had grown up "in the middle of nowhere, in a small gas station," where his family had a pig farm. The idea of escape came to him when his father took over the village movie house. Fatefully, the first double-feature young Baz saw was PAINT YOUR WAGON (Logan, 1969) and CHROME AND LEATHER (Frost, 1971). The former film, thought better of now than on its first release, became almost the last gasp of the Hollywood Musical; the latter, still regarded as a bomb, was one of a flood of youth-oriented motorcycle movies which emerged from the dust of EASY RIDER (Hopper, 1969).

Luhrmann liked them BOTH!

In MOULIN ROUGE, Luhrmann has four fine actors as principals. Kidman (who broke a rib twice and injured her knee) and McGregor work hard, are good looking, sing well, but have to carry too much of the lame story. Jim Broadbent and Richard Roxbury come off better in their equally broad roles because not so much is expected of them. Broadbent, it seems to me, has paddled across the Channel from his performance as William S. Gilbert in Mike Leigh's *TOPSY-TURVY. His Zidler even declares that the Moulin Rouge's Spectacular Spectacular will be the first show in Paris to have all electric lighting. (Broadbent's Gilbert said much the same thing about Gilbert and Sullivan's London production of The Mikado, in Leigh's film.) Roxburgh obviously enjoys his dithering mustachioed villain, and he is fun, although his confidence somewhat unbalances the love triangle.

The other members of the cast are lost in the slice and dice of the non-stop montage. I may be wrong, but I don't think we see any of the important posters Toulouse-Lautrec painted for the Moulin Rouge, which brought Art and Commerce together so memorably. By the end of the show, he is literally a clown.

Luhrmann has the prodigious talents of photographer Donald McAlpin (TEMPEST, 1982; MOON OVER PARADOR, 1988), editor Jill Bilcock (ELIZABETH, 1998), set decorator Brigitte Broch, and most of all, Production Designer Catherine Martin, but they must serve up, in cut and paste fashion, the screenplay that Luhrmann and Craig Pearce (STRICTLY BALLROOM, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO AND JULIET) wrote.

The club Moulin Rouge has served as a subject for many movies. The best of them is probably Jean Renoir's ONLY THE FRENCH CAN-CAN (1955), followed by John Huston's MOULIN ROUGE (1951) and Walter Lang's CAN-CAN (1960), a movie adaptation of the Broadway musical. You would be better off seeing any of those if you want a complete experience. If, however, you were besotted with the avalanche of popular music in the last forty years, you may like Luhrmann's MOULIN ROUGE. But consider that most of these recent songs, unlike say the Freed-Brown retrospective score for *SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, were composed as defiant concert pieces, shouted and distorted by amplifiers to an active audience. The mood of them is jarringly wrong for MOULIN ROUGE'S time and setting. Raucous though that bygone World of Paris nightlife may have been.

If you want a surreal picture of Victorian bohemianism, I recommend you look into the work of a sure influence on Luhrmann, Ken Russell, who was a pioneer in this kind of thing: e.g., SALOME'S LAST DANCE (1988).

What have I left out? Loads. Did I mention the back-beat tango to the Police's "Roxanne"? (From the heroine in Rostand's Cyrano De Bergerac -- get it?)

Okay, I'll quit. Lurhmann has accepted all of the above absurdities, even told his actors he wanted them more over the top. He said MOULIN ROUGE was, among other things, a stand-up comedy combined with "a ridiculous stand-up tragedy."

It is a Bazmark Anthony Luhrmann Production (dedicated to his father, the old projectionist, who died while MOULIN ROUGE was being shot). Produced on a small scale, like "The Fantasticks" or Russell's THE BOYFRIEND (1971) and TOMMY (1975), MOULIN ROUGE might have been beguiling. As it is, the nuggets of artistic gold are hard to find amid the magniloquence.

As Metzinger and I once wrote (in "immortal" words not out of place in Luhrmann's script):

"Bunklenuts are scarce in Morocco."

You have been warned.

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*If you would like to read Macresarf's reviews of some films mentioned above, copy, paste to your, browser and to to the following:

TOPSY-TURVY --

http://macresarf.epinions.com/mvie-review-2375-B81ABBC-3873D2ED-prod1/tk_~CB008.1.1


SINGIN' IN THE RAIN --

http://macresarf.epinions.com/mvie-review-2BF8-C74628-3887549F-bd1

While you are at it, you might want to read my first Epinion. That modest effort was on Michael Curtiz's YANKEE DOODLE DANDY --

http://macresarf.epinions.com/mvie-review-3F14-4187D0-385FF00D-bd4

















Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age