The Moulin Rouge has never been a place that invites somber reality. Located in the sex and neon district called the Pigalle, just down the slope from Montmartre, it’s vaguely fantastical from a distance-the blades of its eponymous red windmill rotating above the muted glaring lights of its entranceway.
In this place, the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec waddled about on his legendary stubby legs, the result of two childhood falls and surgery that didn’t heal properly. Here he conceived his post-Impressionist masterpieces while women in black stockings, white bloomers and kaleidoscope lace dresses steppe dhigh to the music of the day.
You get a taste of this Paris in Baz Luhrmann’s new movie, Moulin Rouge. But it’s the kind of taste you get at the supermarket from the lady handing out stingy free samples in little paper cups. Most of the movie is his own razzmatazz buffet of cinematic styles and sounds-a mutant dreamscape of surreal, unreal, pop, rock, opera, deco, nouveau, po-mo, slo-mo, anachro, you name it-where singers break into songs written or made famous by stars such as Madonna, Sting, the Beatles and Elton John.
It all adds us to a big imaginative mess of a movie that may possibly entertain you in grudging spurts if you are willing to go along with Luhrmann’s self-indulgant ride, which takes you on a visual history of cinema, from the silent era right through plenty of swooping and twitching modern digital technology. But its effect is neither singular nor cumulative, and by the time Luhrmann draws the curtain on his Grand Imperial Cirque de Paris, you may barely remember a single thing you’ve just seen.
Of course, there’s a central plot trite enough to go along with the movie’s back stage musical genre. Satine (Nicole Kidman) is the beautiful performing hooker/belle of the fabulous Moulin Rouge dance hall-brothel, where the elite go to mingle with the lowlife. Christian (Ewan McGregor) is a naive writer who believes in nothing but love. He meets Toulouse-Latrec (John Leguizamo), who snares him to write the lyrics for a grand musical he wants to make about l’amour!
This proposed theatrical love story-set in exotic India-delights Zidler (Jim Broadbent), the owner of the Rouge, who sees a chance to cash in on Satine’s beauty and fame. Christian’s play eventually delights a wealthy Duke (Richard Roxburgh), who agrees to finance the show as long as he gets to marry Satine when its over-although Satine unbeknownst to the Duke has fallen for the writer man.
Moulin Rouge is so frantically photographed and edited that you barely have time to enjoy it. It even becomes more painful after a while to watch the actors working so hard and having their work cut up into little pieces.
Of Kidman one can only say she runs the gamut of emotions from A to B and swallows her dialogue in her by now inimitable way. Her singing voice really isn’t so bad but her acting is all imitation. You might generously blame that on what Luhrmann gives her to work with and what he forces her to do with it.