Moulin Rouge
Mulen Ruzh Starring: Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, Jim Broadbent, John Leguizamo, Richard Roxburgh
Directed by: Baz Luhrmann
Running time: Two hours and 6 minutes

Moulin Rouge is a merciless and uncompromising assault on the senses. And I mean that as a good thing.

The film says that it is "above all, about love." While bombarding viewers with rapturous, operatic joy for all of its 126 minutes, Moulin Rouge strikes me as a film made with love. As the movie tells the emblematic story of love overcoming numerous difficulties, it is somewhat symbolic that director Baz Luhrmann's love for no-holds-barred spectacles has triumphed over bad luck and the studio's commercial straightjacket.

All its production troubles, centred around the on and off screen woes of Nicole Kidman - she was injured onset and going through a highly publicized divorce with Tom Cruise - were never betrayed onscreen. On the contrary, Moulin Rouge manages to surpass Luhrmann's two previous extravaganzas, Strictly Ballroom and Romeo and Juliet. Oddly, in pushing to further extremes, it manages to provide the most emphatic evidence of its creator's talents and present a novel cinematic narrative form.

The film is alluring as it appeals to our own dream places. Luhrmann's lucid, sumptuous recreation of Paris is closer to one's notion of romance than reality itself. The same applies to the famous/infamous Moulin Rouge, what we see is what we want it to be - dynamic and populated by dazzling beauties, endearing romantics and evil rich men.

The story introduces us to Christian (Ewan McGregor), a young Englishman who dreams of becoming a writer and tasting the sweet depravity of Paris at the turn of the last century. He is befriended by Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo), an energetic cripple who lives upstairs and wants to stage a play showcasing the talents of the brilliant, but incurably ill, Satine (Nicole Kidman), the star of the Moulin Rouge.

Christian is enchanted by Satine, and his love inspires him to unleash his writing talents. Zidler (Jim Broadbent), the manager of the Moulin Rouge, also takes fondness to the idea and contacts the Evil Duke (Richard Roxburgh), who is willing to finance the enterprise in exchange for Satine's bedtime services. The trouble is that Satine is not willing to have the show produced at that price, because she has fallen hopelessly for Christian.

This setup is as old as the world and was one of the first exploited in silent cinema, so it is no great surprise that Luhrmann treats it with the emotional extremism of silent films. You can walk into the cinema at any time and know right away who is good and who is bad. In purely academic terms, Moulin Rouge shows what cinema would look like if the emotional standards of years past were applied.

In a perverse way, the movie is a cinematic companion to Dancer in the Dark, which also looked like a contemporary silent film emotionally, and did a frightening job at that.

While it toyed with serious drama, Moulin Rouge is injected with joyous melodramatic fun. Luhrmann has gone even further, he has managed to update the appeal of the musical. Moulin Rouge evokes the irresistible lure musicals had over viewers some 50 years ago. It does so by applying contemporary technical marvels, and integrating musical highlights from the 1970s and 1980s wonderfully into the narrative. This works because they are still instantly recognizable, and yet in the year 2001, they already seem remote and exotic.

Oh yes, Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman DO sing in the film, and wonderfully so.

All of these factors conspire to create a manic and intensely enjoyable film. Film is too narrow a word though - Moulin Rouge is close to being a new art form. It is a "pop-opera."