Love, Musicals: Moulin Rouge! (Dir Baz Lurhmann, 2h8m, 2001)

The musical is a heightening of reality; we, after all, do not live in a world of musical cats vying for resurrection, trains battling for affection-on rollerskates!- rap-battling Founding Fathers (or indeed singing Presidents, superheroes, Che Guevara etc), all number of poorly transferred novels, films, and even occasionally videogames, and whatever the hell Jerry Springer: The Opera was. Whilst the cinematic musical often leans into the qualities of its medium by creating moments that live theatre cannot, the trend in adaptions of tentpole musicals-Tom Hooper's 2012 adaption of Les Miserables and 2019 adaption of Cats, for example-is to lean into a realism that defeats the very purpose of musical theatre.

This, I must confess, is part of my recalitrance against cinematic musicals; they are so often, except in the world of animation, a shallow imitation of what the theatre brings us by the very act of imagination, of leaving behind the outside world and allowing sets to become places, costumed actors and actresses to become animals, trains, and historical or fictional characters, for tales to be sung and danced, rather than spoken. It's not a fair fight: after all, even musical theatre has had centuries of headstart and cinema is a medium of image, of truth before the camera. Yet, there are films that attempt to bridge this gap, to match the intensified reality of the musical with a knowing playfulness with the rules of image, and of cinema, of inately theatrical cinematic dreams. Such a film is Moulin Rouge, in which the doomed love story of an English writer, Christian (Ewan McGregor) and a Parisian singer and dancer at the titular nightclub Satine (Nicole Kidman) play out against a lavish, and eclecticaly soundtracked backdrop of turn of the century Paris. 

Baz Lurhmann is a newcomer to this blog, but his style precedes him: beginning with 1992's Strictly Ballroom, which forms, together with Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge!, his highly theatrical The Red Curtain Trilogy, so Lurhmann's style arrived almost fully formed, and a quintessential product of the 90s: highly stylised visuals, quick-cut MTV-esque editing, a strong flair for the dramatic and melodramatic, and soundtracks stacked with comtemporary pop, rock, rap (in the case of The Great Gatsby (2013)) and Americana (2022's Elvis). Whilst Lurhmann's star has never really descended from the cinematic sky-all six of his films have comfortably made bank, it is still the one-two-three punch of The Red Curtain Trilogy, of which Moulin Rouge! is arguably the best part, that he remains known for.

In Here It's Entertaining: Moulin Rouge!'s visuals are nothing short of spectacular

Moulin Rouge! is Lurhmann's great treatise on love-we begin in 1901 with a mourning Christian, before cutting back a year to 1900, with his arrival in the Bohemian Belle Epoque Paris suburb Montmartre-whilst cinema's birth, occurring a few kilometres south, is only alluded to a couple of times, these opening sequences adopt a grainly film texture, the first of several moments Luhrmann and cinematographer Donald McAlpine play with the language of cinema. Christian is looking for inspiration, and for love, previously unknown to him. Soon interrupted by one of a troupe of players under Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo), and providing them with inspiration via the title song from The Sound of Music, soon becomes part of the troupe. From here, we are transported to the Moulin Rouge, for the meeting that will forever change not just Christian, but everyone involved's lives.

Moulin Rouge! is Lurhmann's great treatise on song-the film, after all, is a jukebox musical, but rather than taking from a singular artist, a time and place, or a genre, Luhrmann seems to shuffle as he will. Nowhere is this seen better than in the introduction to the Moulin Rouge, an outrageous, meticulously shot-there are hours of sequences cut down into this dizzying blast through pop culture. It's decadance, presided over by Jim Broadbent's impressario-cum-ringmaster, Zidler, time speeding up and slowing down at the drop of a hat, whilst the needle skips, interplays, and mashes up 70s disco track "Lady Marmalade" covered by Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mýa and Pink, Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and the Can Can, the energy building to a frenetic visual pace of fast cut montage.

In the Name of Love: Christian (Ewan McGregor) and Satine (Nicole Kidman)'s romance is not just a quintessentially cinematic lovestory but an innately musical one

Into this comes Satine, the star of the Moulin Rouge, with a reworking of "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend", and it is here, having that the film's dysfunctional love triangle takes shape. Satine is determined to go straight, to take the Moulin Rouge, Zidler and his performers into legitimate theatre; this, though, requires a positively Faustian pact with the Duke, (a dastardly scenery chewing performance from Richard Roxburgh), whose designs on Satine are complicated with the arrival of Christian, intending only to present the play he is working on, but finding himself falling in love with Satine, and thus into conflict with the Duke. Much of this love story, whetre both McGregor and Kidman shine, is a bricolage of songs, both referenced and sung: from a showstopper that moves from Beatles to Bowie to Elton John, all singing about-yes-love, so we cross back and forth across decades, genres, and artists, all in search, like Christian hinself, of love, or lovers. 

If one thing is truly memorable from Moulin Rouge! it is this devil may care attitude to the rock and roll canon; yet for the eleclecticism, there is a great deal of care taken over each song's place in the narrative.  that is still : Like a Virgin as a big band number sung by a man: Rozanne as a Tango: Queen's "The Show Must Go On" as a Broadway number? Massive Attack and David Bowie covering Nat King Cole standard "Nature Boy", the latter of which, diagetically, acts as bookends of the film covered by McGregor and Leguizamo respectively? All of these are not just smartly arranged songs but integral parts of the film: Luhrmann, co-writer Craig Pearce and arranger/composer Craig Armstrong know this, know that there is no union more potent than music and love, about how these two forces can drive men mad, or inspire them.

Moulin Rouge is a film, as all the best musicals truly are, of how music and love are intertwined, of how love can inspire one to create the great songs of the western pop canon, and how these songs have formed the background to so many tales of love, though few as grand as this

Rating: Highly Recommended

Moulin Rouge! is available to stream via Disney+, and on DVD and BluRay from Twentieth Century Fox. It is also currently available via these platforms in the United States

Next week, and indeed next month, a short hop across the Channel to Brighton, as we begin our season on British Gangsters with Pinky Brown in Brighton Rock.