Moulin Rouge!

365 Films

Entry #95

Moulin Rouge (2001)

Directed by Baz Luhrmann

One of the things I love about the work of director Baz Luhrmann is that you know where you stand with him within only five minutes of his movies.  You’re either on the verge of hysteria from pure ecstatic joy, or you’re about one step shy of gouging out both of your eyeballs.  For my money, it takes a lot of chutzpah to be so disarmingly naked in your filmmaking and it’s worthy of applause no matter what which side of the argument you happen to inhabit.  I thought about this a lot during Moulin Rouge!, Luhrmann’s all singing, all dancing pop-musical extravaganza from 2001.  In particular, the first ten minutes, which visually ping-pongs the viewer back and forth in time between Ewan McGregor’s love-sick Christian morosely banging away at his type writer and the titular mad-house that serves as the main narrative itself.  Then there’s the introductory flashback sequence where Christian meets his subsequent bohemian comrades that features enough zap-pow-kaching-bam cartoon sound effects to fill an entire Looney Tunes collection.  Believe me, I completely understand why some people detest this movie (and Luhrmann’s work in general) like a sickness, I just happen to completely and utterly disagree.  One of the things I love most about Moulin Rouge is its stubborn refusal to obey any of the laws governing adult behavior.  The film has as sophisticated a take on love as two self-obsessed sixteen year olds and it has no qualms about being completely intoxicated by it.  This is made plainly clear by the widely discussed anachronistic soundtrack spilling out of the images.  The film takes place in the Montmartre quarter of Paris at the beginning of the 20^th century, yet the patrons of the Moulin Rouge lose their shit to the likes of Nirvana, Labelle, and a Marilyn Monroe medley.  To say the film is not interested in historical inaccuracy would be a severe understatement; it simply has no time for that sort of thing.  In it’s all encompassing obsession with truth, beauty, freedom, and love, the idea that a pop-cultural phenomenon such as Like a Virgin solely belongs to the era in which it was created is laughable.  Similarly, when one falls madly in love for the first time, their emotional current is similar to that of an old jukebox.  We skip violently from one emotion to the next and on a more literal level; our relationships can sometimes be defined by the physical music that surrounds us.  In other words, Moulin Rouge is pure, unfiltered, and unprocessed emotions.  It’s not about understanding why these songs and these ideas can endure through time; it’s about embracing it and fighting with every last breath in your body to keep it.  The main criticism often lobbed at Mr. Luhrmann is that his staging and cutting is more akin to modern day music videos than actual filmmaking, and to that I say, “so what?” The argument could also be made that Luhrmann has reinvigorated the music video medium through the techniques of experimental filmmaking.  When you watch what passes these days for a jukebox musical (I’m looking at you Rock of Ages, although I’d rather not because you’re absolutely terrible) you see a series of visual choices that seems incapable or unwilling to allow you to actually enjoy the music and dance that the creators and performers pretend to be celebrating.  Compare that with something like Moulin Rouge, which uses a similarly pulverizing editing style but takes it to its most extreme, abstract level.  There are sequences in Moulin Rouge that are borderline avant-garde in how they are timed in such a way to deliver maximum emotional impact by way of little more than a flurry of images that register more subliminally than consciously.  It’s a bold, daring film that outstrips any of the revitalized movie musicals that unfortunately limped onto screens in its wake.