I can foresee the day coming when I'm going to
have to take seasickness tablets before watching a motion picture. Moulin Rouge! is just
as frenetic as Pearl Harbor, although no one could accuse Baz Luhrmann,
the director, of being
uncertain about what he's doing. Moulin Rouge! is a tightly organized movie, and
often overpowering, too overpowering for its own good. But the movie works hard
and it deserves the critical and commercial success it has received.
No one should go to the film expecting to see a
remake of the 1953 picture directed by John Huston, based on a trashy best
selling fictionalized biography in the Lust for Life vein by Pierre La Mure,
starring José Ferrer as the French painter and poster artist Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec. In fact, all the two movies share in common is a character
bearing this name--played byJohn Leguizamo in this version--who appears in both the older and more recent productions. But
the central character in Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! is a young English writer,
Christian (Ewan McGregor), who
comes to Paris in the 1890s in search of the "bohemian revolution".
Once
there, he resides in a garret opposite the famous dance hall, and falls madly in
love with its star attraction, the chanteuse and courtesan Satine (Nicole
Kidman). When the impresario Harold Zidler (Jim Broadbent) shows interest in
staging a show Christian has written as a vehicle for Satine, it seems as if the
former might be on the verge of seeing his dreams come true. Unfortunately, the
most likely angel for this production is the malevolent Duke of Monroth (Richard
Roxburgh), who is equally smitten with Satine and wants to make her his mistress
as his recompense for backing the show.
Nevertheless,
to get a more accurate idea of what's going on in the film, it's best to imagine
a story about a naïf coming to San Francisco in the summer of love in the 1960s,
meeting a girl who is the star of a rock band that's trying to break into the
big time and who is being wooed by an unscrupulous promoter. The band wants to
stage the musical the naif has penned, but the promoter demands the girl sleep
with him...And now project this scenario back into la belle époque.
Where Rent
moved La Bohème into 1990s New York,
Moulin Rouge! moves its saga of young
musicians trying to make it back to 1899, but the story bears a striking
similarity to that of Todd Haynes's The Velvet
Goldmine.
This
highly labile blend of ingredients goes quite sour about halfway through the
action, when it begins taking the saga of Satine's attempts to fend off the
wealthy Duke without ruining Christian's chances for success very seriously. What starts off as an amusing send up of a Vicente
Minnelli musical like An American in Paris turns into something as oppressively
morose as the last reels of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red
Shoes. To make matters worse, not only does the Duke dispatch an assassin to do
in Christian, but Satine--with a nod in the direction of Marguerite
Gautier--turns out to be mortally afflicted with tuberculosis.
Although
Moulin Rouge! makes ample use of its dance hall setting as a background for
various production numbers, it does not belong to the
"putting-on-a-show" subgenre of the musical. Rather, it is closer to
American musicals of the 1940s and 1950s such as Minnelli's Meet Me In Saint
Louis or George Cukor's A Star Is Born, in which the numbers serve to expand the
dramatic framework of the action. When the film succeeds in doing this--for
example, when it intercuts back and forth between a tango danced by members of
the dance hall troupe and the Duke's attempted seduction of Satine--it is very
effective indeed.
But
uncertainty of
tone vitiates the film's achievements. It is particularly damning in this regard
to compare Moulin Rouge! with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and
The Young Girls of
Rochefort (1967) of Jacques Demy, who explored the possibilities of this kind of
musical as deeply as any director has ever done. Although Demy's movies are not
everyone's cup of tea, and they were wrongly taken as romantic trifles in this
country--Umbrellas of Cherbourg was generally received as a fable of love
triumphing over all--Luhrmann's picture never even begins to reach the
combination of wistful pathos and lyric subtlety that Demy was able to create in
those two works, much less to go beyond it into new territory.
Moulin
Rouge! is afflicted with an acute case of belatedness, to use one of Harold Bloom's
favorite terms. Luhrmann and company are too conscious of the past that lies
behind them to be able to treat their material with anything resembling
spontaneity. Moulin Rouge! labors under a double weight: that of old movie
musicals and that of the more recent rock music scene. It's as if quotation
marks have been slapped around everything--not Montmartre, but "Montmartre,"
not Toulouse-Lautrec, but "Toulouse-Lautrec," a device Susan Sontag
noted as typical of camp ("Camp sees everything in quotation marks")
in her famous essay on the subject.
Although it would be
misleading to characterize Moulin Rouge! as campy, when older material is
treated in this way the result at the least can only be parody, a mode that
already came into vogue in the early days of modernism, but which still
continues strong today. And like so many postmodernist efforts, this film
ultimately has a highly ambivalent attitude toward the genre it is both trying
to resurrect and parodying. The inability to bring the genre back to life except
as parody manifests itself in a destructive violence which tears Moulin Rouge!
apart in spite of the nominally upbeat ending in which Christian lives on to
keep alive the memory of Satine.
In fact, I
think it is worth considering if the musical genre--at least in its traditional
incarnation--was not a dead issue after Bob Fosse's Cabaret. The great closing
shot in that film shows Brown Shirts seated among the audience reflected in the
mirror, anticipating the horrors that were to come in 1933. A visual gesture of
such pregnancy does not simply import an element of seriousness that had been
lacking in most older musicals--it radically challenges the underpinnings of the
genre, by pulling it momentarily into the completely alien world of twentieth
century politics at its most diabolical.
Unhappiness
had hardly been absent from early musicals. The Gold Diggers of 1933 contains an
unforgettable evocation of the Great Depression with its "Remember the
Forgotten Man" number. Yet wasn't the underlying moral--most explicitly
presented in Walt Disney's Snow White--that music itself was capable of chasing
the clouds away, no matter how dark they might be? Yet to imagine a musical
taking on the Holocaust is like imagining Springtime for Hitler done in utter
seriousness and not as an unspeakably tasteless joke. In the final shot of Cabaret, history knocks on the door of the musical, and its rap may well have
been a fatal one.
It would be difficult to
exaggerate Nicole Kidman's contribution to Moulin
Rouge!. I liked her quite bit in
Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, but she easily walks off with this picture. It
is well worth the price of admission just to see her rendition of
"Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," which pumps some much needed
adrenaline into the movie after a rather slowly paced exposition. She is ably
supported by Jim Broadbent as Zidler, but I found Ewan McGregor embarrassingly
callow, even given the role he was playing, and Richard Roxburgh as the Duke
positively reeks of the moustache-twirling villain of an old-time melodrama.
Even
in a black and white production, visuals have always counted for a lot in a
musical. In Moulin Rouge!, Donald McAlpine (cinematography),
Catherine Martin (production design), Ann-Marie Beauchamp and Ian Gracie (art
direction), along with Catherine Martin--once more--and Angus Strathie
(costumes), all have done a laudable job of giving an almost too luscious fin
de siècle look to the entire proceedings, one that far outdoes Cecil
Beaton's contributions to Minnelli's execrable Gigi (1958).
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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