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Moulin Rouge
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Like William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet before it, Moulin Rouge is a brilliant film. It takes a basic text and envisions it entirely cinematically. It finds ways to express in images what narrative storytelling has been doing for centuries. That Luhrmann takes Méliès as his inspiration makes it all the more effective. The film is frequently as wild and inspirational as Méliès' were and shares their capacity to inspire awe and wonder. Méliès told fantastic stories using every trick in the newly-opened book of moviemaking at precisely the time in which this film is set.
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Moulin Rouge is a movie of contradictions, but is ... crystal clear in the telling of its tale. True, it borrows heavily from such different sources as the MGM musicals of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland to Alexandre Dumas Fils' "La Dame aux Camelias," but it is the blending of these many different kinds of film and literature that allow the sum total of its parts to end up being pretty amazing. There is such flair to every aspect of Moulin Rouge, so many ideas and images thrown at the audience, that it makes the average by-the-numbers Hollywood movie crawl away in embarrassment. The movie has great humor but also intense pathos and real tragedy. It is a movie that rewards repeat viewing as it always holds something new to discover, another layer to roll back.
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Immortalized by French artist, Toulouse-Lautrec, and the birthplace of the dance, the cancan, the Moulin Rouge (The Red Windmill) took its name from one of the windmills of Montmartre. On October 5, 1889, the Moulin Rouge opened as the "rendez-vous du high life" at the foot of Montmartre. Both a dance hall and cabaret, it housed a large dance floor, mirrored walls, and a fashionable gallery lit by round glass globes of gas lamps mounted throughout the interior. In the garden were an outdoor stage and an enormous wooden elephant, with interior stairs leading to a glass-enclosed howdah, tame monkeys, and donkeys that ladies would ride after removing their stockings. There were masked balls twice a week. The music was a brassy accompaniment to various new forms of the risqué "cancan" which shocked some visitors.
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A dazzling and yet frequently maddening bid to bring the movie musical kicking and screaming into the 21st century, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge bears no relation to the many previous films set in the famous Parisian nightclub. This may appear to be Paris in the 1890s, with can-can dancers, bohemian denizens like Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo), and ribaldry at every turn, but it's really Luhrmann's pop-cultural wonderland. Everyone and everything is encouraged to shatter boundaries of time and texture, colliding and careening in a fast-cutting frenzy that thinks nothing of casting Elton John's "Your Song" 80 years before its time. Nothing is original in this kaleidoscopic, absinthe-inspired love tragedy--the words, the music, it's all been heard before. But when filtered through Luhrmann's love for pop songs and timeless showmanship, you're reminded of the cinema's power to renew itself while paying homage to its past.
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Even though Moulin Rouge is not based on Australian characters or stories, the movie is very Australian in that it reflects a bohemian spirit of the early 20th century that exists in aspects of Australian society today. As 20 per cent of the Australian population are immigrants, Australia is flooded with the diverse cultures of the world. Furthermore, many of the native born have a strong desire to embrace and integrate these cultures into something new. It is this talent of integration where Lurhmann's genius resides. For example, by blending the Police's "Roxanne", a song about a prostitute, with the Tango, a dance invented in Argentine brothels, Lurhmann blends the cultures of two different countries to create something completely unique. Likewise, when he uses Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit to capture the bohemian spirit of Paris in the early 19th century, he blends cultural expressions from completely different eras. It is with great irony then that Lurhmann created something uniquely Australian by incorporating artistic themes that are so universal.
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"Moulin Rouge" is more ramshackle and harried than "Romeo + Juliet," and it doesn't have the same languorous resonance. The story, written by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, is simple and desperately operatic. " the voice-over begins, as young Christian (McGregor) relays the tale of how he came to Paris to become a writer, only to find himself entangled in a web of tragedy and loss.
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Moulin Rouge