Gorillas in the mist (7/19/01)
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Moulin Rouge. [Baz Luhrmann, 2001. Written by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce.]
A sort of postmodern
La Bohème, nested within several sets of bracketing quotation marks and rendered as music video: aspiring writer Ewan McGregor, having fled his bourgeois upbringing and made his way to Paris to seek his artistic fortune amid absinthesoaked Bohemian squalor, is no sooner installed in a picturesque garret than introduced to his neighbor Toulouse Lautrec [John Leguizamo, looking very short] and an extremely colorful supporting posse, hears the magic words “let’s put on a show!”, and, his services enlisted as prospective author for the inevitable musical-within-the-musical, makes a pilgrimage to the Moulin Rouge, where he discovers the star of the proceedings, Nicole Kidman. In scarce a Montmartre minute he’s fallen for the babe, she’s begun to delicately cough blood into her handkerchief, and he and the Duke [Richard Roxburgh] who has been conned into fronting the money for the theatrical venture [an Indian romance, in apparent homage to Bollywood] are using their argument over the way the internal story is supposed to end to channel their contest for her favors. No surprise, Ms. Kidman follows the famous example of the Polish starlet and fucks the writer; and then follows the even more famous example of the Lady of the Camellias and expires operatically/theatrically/tragically/“tragically” — a demise over which it is impossible to shed either a tear or “a tear”, because, as with everyone and everything else in this movie, it looks like she’s having too much fun.
Hallucinatory production design, great dance sequences [as you would expect from the auteur of
Strictly Ballroom], an ingenious use of musical anachronism [the first big production number quotes “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”, and it only gets weirder], and a wealth of eccentric individuating detail, e.g., how the sitar player ends up being played by the narcoleptic Argentinian. [Note, however, that McGregor’s Underwood typewriter is a model not available in 1900. Should this matter?]
There’s an essay in the question why it was so exactly right to quote modern popular music rather than to try to write something new. But for the moment suffice it that if Luhrmann could compose like Puccini on top of everything else, his talent would be more than human. — As it is, he’s a fucking genius. I can’t remember the last time I heard the audience applaud at the end of a movie. Check this out.
____________He’s taking the fall, sweetheart (7/13/01)
