Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Spectacular! Spectacular!
Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001) is an extraordinary object—a special-effects heavy, avant-garde rock operatic mixture of Camille (1937), French Cancan (1955), Les Enfants Du Paradis (1944), and Lola Montès (1955). It is an excessive work that provoked controversy. Some are enamored of its verve, its vibrant carnivalesque sequences, its extraordinary percussive editing, and its score ransacked from years of popular music. For others, the verve and vibrancy do not make up for confusing MTV-style editing, a thin story, and cartoon-like humor.
Moulin Rouge! mixes real people (Toulouse-Lautrec, Erik Satie, Nini-Legs-in-the-Air, and the manager of the Moulin Rouge Charles Ziedler, renamed Harold Zidler), with fictional elements—all borrowed. The hero and heroine’s story comes partly from Orphic myth, partly from Camille. The theme of putting on a show at the Moulin Rouge is from French Cancan. And the subplot involving the admirer of a magnetic actress being prepared to kill his rivals comes from Les Enfants du Paradis.
In 1899, the real-life proprietors of the Moulin Rouge installed the brightest, newest electric lights to reveal a revolutionary, raucous, bawdy nighttime entertainment to an audience in which the upper and lower classes rubbed shoulders. In Moulin Rouge!, Luhrmann and his colleagues do not create an accurate, but inevitably nostalgic, picture of the Moulin Rouge. Instead they attempt to produce the feeling of excitement that the 1899 Moulin Rouge audiences must have felt, when everything was shiny and new—and dangerous. And to do this, they use a throbbing mélange of recent songs, and the most rapid cutting you have ever seen.
The spectacular musical sequences include the first visit of Christian (Ewan McGregor), a young writer, to the Moulin Rouge, where images flash, figures swirl, curtains part, women in vibrant silks and satins, lift their skirts high, and the aural mix includes dancers and singers performing “Lady Marmalade (Voulez-Vous Couchez Avec Moi),” lines of men in tails singing the chorus from Kurt Cobain’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and the Moulin Rouge orchestra playing “Because We Can (Cancan).” The Moulin Rouge is, “a kingdom of nighttime pleasures,” in which, Christian and we, the audience, are massively overloaded. Our sensory experience is of a “big blooming buzzing confusion”—to use William James’ (1892) description of the new born child’s initial experience of the world. After this introduction, a mass of men look up—a sea of white shirts peaking out of formal black coats. White confetti sprinkles down. And above, Satine (Nicole Kidman) the star of the Moulin Rouge appears on a trapeze—her skin luminescent—singing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
[James, William. Psychology. New York, N.Y.: Collier, 1892]
Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001) is an extraordinary object—a special-effects heavy, avant-garde rock operatic mixture of Camille (1937), French Cancan (1955), Les Enfants Du Paradis (1944), and Lola Montès (1955). It is an excessive work that provoked controversy. Some are enamored of its verve, its vibrant carnivalesque sequences, its extraordinary percussive editing, and its score ransacked from years of popular music. For others, the verve and vibrancy do not make up for confusing MTV-style editing, a thin story, and cartoon-like humor.
Moulin Rouge! mixes real people (Toulouse-Lautrec, Erik Satie, Nini-Legs-in-the-Air, and the manager of the Moulin Rouge Charles Ziedler, renamed Harold Zidler), with fictional elements—all borrowed. The hero and heroine’s story comes partly from Orphic myth, partly from Camille. The theme of putting on a show at the Moulin Rouge is from French Cancan. And the subplot involving the admirer of a magnetic actress being prepared to kill his rivals comes from Les Enfants du Paradis.
In 1899, the real-life proprietors of the Moulin Rouge installed the brightest, newest electric lights to reveal a revolutionary, raucous, bawdy nighttime entertainment to an audience in which the upper and lower classes rubbed shoulders. In Moulin Rouge!, Luhrmann and his colleagues do not create an accurate, but inevitably nostalgic, picture of the Moulin Rouge. Instead they attempt to produce the feeling of excitement that the 1899 Moulin Rouge audiences must have felt, when everything was shiny and new—and dangerous. And to do this, they use a throbbing mélange of recent songs, and the most rapid cutting you have ever seen.
The spectacular musical sequences include the first visit of Christian (Ewan McGregor), a young writer, to the Moulin Rouge, where images flash, figures swirl, curtains part, women in vibrant silks and satins, lift their skirts high, and the aural mix includes dancers and singers performing “Lady Marmalade (Voulez-Vous Couchez Avec Moi),” lines of men in tails singing the chorus from Kurt Cobain’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and the Moulin Rouge orchestra playing “Because We Can (Cancan).” The Moulin Rouge is, “a kingdom of nighttime pleasures,” in which, Christian and we, the audience, are massively overloaded. Our sensory experience is of a “big blooming buzzing confusion”—to use William James’ (1892) description of the new born child’s initial experience of the world. After this introduction, a mass of men look up—a sea of white shirts peaking out of formal black coats. White confetti sprinkles down. And above, Satine (Nicole Kidman) the star of the Moulin Rouge appears on a trapeze—her skin luminescent—singing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
[James, William. Psychology. New York, N.Y.: Collier, 1892]
posted by John Bloomfield at 10:01 PM
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