Moulin Rouge: “the artiest film ever predicated as a summer blockbuster”

Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge is both an old-fashioned Hollywood backstage musical with a La Bohème-like thrust and a postmodern pantechnicon of pop-cultural allusions. It embraces low farce laden with sexual double entendres and rises to rhapsodic peaks as it spirals towards its predestined romantic tragedy. It relocates 1999’s all-singing, all-talking, all-raving global millenarian shindig and the supposedly democratic disco creed of Manhattan’s Studio 54 to Charles Ziedler’s celebrated Montmartre nightclub in 1899. It has Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo) and his cronies pitching a show to a lisping moneybags, with Nicole Kidman’s courtesan-showgirl as the bait. And since nothing is sacred, it reinvents Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’ by having Jim Broadbent’s pimping MC ‘Harold Zidler’ enact it as a lewd comedy number with homoerotic overtones. As such, it is some movie.

That Luhrmann all but throws away the film’s snarling can-can dancers in one frenzied scene that mutates into a Felliniesque pageant replete with dwarfs and a snake wrestler indicates his lack of interest in the conventional Belle Epoque imagery used in John Huston’s 1953 Moulin Rouge and Jean Renoir’s 1955 French Cancan, although the latter lent him its artists-vs-producers plot. The spiritual influences, he says, are Sunrise, Les Enfants du paradis, The Red Shoes, Lola Montès and such 19th-century novels as Dumas’ Lady of the Camellias. His film’s neurasthenic villain, the Duke (Richard Roxburgh), would appear to have stepped out of Huysman’s Against Nature, however, while Broadbent’s lipsmacking performance makes one wonder if Luhrmann saw Little Voice.

The opener of this year’s Cannes festival and perhaps the artiest film ever predicated as a summer blockbuster, Moulin Rouge may have significance beyond its immediate buzz. As with Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), there’s the sense that it comes with its own mythic carapace which not even bad box office would be able to crack. Luhrmann and his co-writer Craig Pearce facilitated this by constructing the movie on the Orphean myth and overlaying it with a mosaic of iconographic movie images and songs, with lyrics extrapolated from those songs as dialogue. It suggests that when multiple cinematic mini-myths – Julie Andrews singing “the hills are alive with the sound of music”, say – are montaged together in a new arena, their meanings change and they come to comprise an irreducible supermyth that’s a fount for future myths.

Will Moulin Rouge singlehandedly revive the musical as a genre? Given its event status, this is the question Luhrmann’s film will provoke in a way that other recent musicals, including Woody Allen’s everyday Everyone Says I Love You and Lars von Trier’s lumpen Dancer in the Dark, overwhelmingly failed to. Whereas Moulin Rouge’s postmodern pillaging of imagery is scarcely new, the corny, oddly pleasing and deconstructive use of pop lyrics as dialogue – “Love is a many-splendoured thing, love lifts us up where we belong, all you need is love,” says the idealistic poet protagonist Christian (Ewan McGregor) to Kidman’s sceptical Satine – comes across as novel, like something Dennis Potter might have dreamed up in his push towards non-naturalism. But it’s not necessarily an innovation that could work a second time. In contrast, the film’s recasting of modern pop standards is revelatory. More successful even than ‘Like a Virgin’ and McGregor’s anthemic, Broadwayish rendition of Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ is Jose Feliciano’s guttural, sardonic version of the Police’s ‘Roxanne’, which, fused with an Argentinian tango, reminds the sexually jealous Christian that Satine, at that very moment, is girded up like Rita Hayworth’s Gilda and whoring herself to his nemesis, the Duke.

Still, it’s the film’s showstoppers that will tip audiences old and new to the screen musical’s ecstatic power, essentially dormant since the days of Cabaret (1972). After Zidler, Satine, Christian and his bohemian friends have spontaneously pitched a Hindi musical to the Duke, Christian retires to his garret to start writing it. Across the street, past the red windmill with its spinning sails, Satine emerges from her brothelly boudoir on to the balcony of the Moulin Rouge’s three-storey, papier-mâché elephant and sings to spine-tingling effect ‘One Day I’ll Fly Away’. The perfect choice for the yearnings of a consumptive courtesan frightened that she’s falling in love with a penniless poet, it gets to the core of Moulin Rouge’s conflict between the bohemian ideals of beauty, freedom, truth and love on the one hand and corrupting commerce on the other. Mostly, though, it’s a rapture. And so, too, is the subsequent medley of “silly love songs” with which Christian convinces Satine she’s in love with him as they dance against a starlit sky under the watchful eyes of a moustachioed Méliès moon.

Like Strictly Ballroom (1992) and Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge was made in what Luhrmann describes as “red-curtain style”. As if to emphasise the point, he opens the film on a vast red curtain being pulled back to reveal the familiar 20th Century Fox logo. The immediate invocation of theatricalism, even before we have seen a character or a setting, warns us that the film about to unspool will not trade in the homogenous utilitarian naturalism that has dominated Hollywood cinema since the eclipse of the musical and the melodrama in the 60s.

Once Luhrmann gets going, the warning becomes a mission statement. A flickering black-and-white panorama of Paris, as the Lumière brothers might have filmed it, morphs into the luridly hued Montmartre, where raddled whores hover on the edge of the frame. We see a tiny cut-in figure of Christian, “a very strange enchanted boy” according to David Bowie’s haunting rendition of the mystical Eden Ahbez song ‘Nature Boy’, which provides the film with its musical prelude, its epilogue and its mantra: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn/Is just to love and be loved in return.”

In lifting this particular red curtain, Luhrmann invested his film with his own version of the passionate illusionism that characterised the work of Michael Powell, Marcel Carné and Vincente Minnelli, directors whose films have used the backstage set-up as a window into surrealism. Although he filmed Satine’s death naturalistically, as he did the scenes of Satine and Christian being in love, Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge is mostly a self-consciously delirious immersion in artifice for artifice’s sake.

The illusory mood, a form of shamanism, is sustained by the pitch sequence – the show within the show that frames a tragic romantic triangle, mirroring the story being played out between Christian, Satine and the Duke – and crescendoes with the Moulin Rouge’s obscenely opulent Bollywood spectacular. Throughout there is an implicit commentary on how an artistically pure small production made in a spirit of friendship can be compromised by a philistine financier with power to make story changes.

Luhrmann says that red-curtain style requires a recognisable mythic structure, a heightened theatrical setting and the constant jogging of the audience’s elbow to remind it that it’s watching a movie. The audience should also know how the movie is going to end, so here he has Christian telling us right away that Satine is dead. As the film proceeds, he provides innumerable quotations, which shock with the risky recontextualisation of famous pop moments. This can lead to bizarre self-reflexivity. When Satine descends on a swing above the slavering punters in the Moulin Rouge, she is dressed as Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. The song she sings (in a raspy Rosalind Russell voice) is Marilyn Monroe’s ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But when Satine segues into ‘Material Girl’, it’s not simply Madonna who is inscribed, but Monroe again, since in her video for the song Madonna dressed as Monroe in her pink gown from the ‘Diamonds’ number. That Kidman resembles Ann-Margret playing Las Vegas in the scene adds to its complex allure.

Throughout the film the camera rockets through the digitalised Montmartre streets, bursting into the techno cacophony of the club or craning up into Christian’s garret. Luhrmann says this is a time-saving ploy to compress the action, but it has the effect of shoving the audience through a dream. Reinforcing the ‘dream’ notion is the scene of Christian tapping at his Remington at the beginning of the film: when he admits to having nothing to write, the narcoleptic Argentinian tango dancer crashes through his skylight, like a swarthy Alice, and Christian’s surreal trip begins. At the end of the film we see him back at his typewriter, having, perhaps, dreamed or written the entire story.

Either as dream or as psychoanalytic model, Moulin Rouge is a quest – Christian’s search for a treasure or knowledge that, like Orpheus, he must bring back from the underworld of his psyche. The hell he must descend to in the film is the Moulin Rouge with its “delightfully filthy repertoire”, as Renoir described it. He goes there to retrieve Satine, his Eurydice, who, as a courtesan, is spiritually dead. Because Christian’s songs are so beautiful, he’s allowed to claim Satine and bring her back to the world of the living. But in his moment of triumph, he breaches the conditions of their escape by looking back – he tells the Duke that Satine doesn’t love him, consigning her to death once more. Whereas Orpheus is eventually torn to pieces by the Maenads, we never find out what happens to Christian, though Luhrmann gloomily speculates that, as a product of a society being changed by technology, he might end up dying in a hail of machine-gun bullets on Flanders Field.

If we must go there, then let Christian, who is English, die under the command of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’s Clive Wynne-Candy. He shares, after all, Candy’s romantic heart and love of an ultimately unobtainable red-headed dream woman. This is another way of saying that Moulin Rouge – with its flame-haired Kidman, its red windmill and its red-curtain style – is, consciously or not, indebted to Powell and Pressburger’s iridescent cinema of the Red Shoes/Tales of Hoffman era. A masterpiece of red-curtain filmmaking, The Red Shoes is also a backstage dream of cinema in which a woman performer, prima ballerina Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), is torn between an older, oppressive authoritarian patron and the man she loves. And like female characters in Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus and Gone to Earth, she plunges to her death. In Moulin Rouge, Satine’s plunge from her swing in a consumptive faint (emblematic of Eurydice’s sexual ‘fall’) is a premonition of her end.

In The Tales of Hoffman an artistically pure Orphean poet recounts his romantic failure at the hands of three women – one of them a courtesan who, like Satine, is seduced by diamonds. Here Powell supplanted dialogue with music and dance as he strove to achieve a synaesthetic magical realism in an allegory about greed and materialism. If that’s not precisely what Luhrmann is up to – “poetry” is his stated goal – he runs it close with his kaleidoscopic magical mystery tour through a Montmartre never-never land.