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Film Review By John Demetry
In a relentless assault on the senses—and the sensitivities—of the audience, Luhrmann jettisons all spatial, narrative, historical and emotional coherence. It starts with the lie of the title. The famous Moulin Rouge introduced the Can-Can dance choreographed to Offenbach's "Orpheus in the Underworld". It represented a fascinating commingling of the vulgarity and sensuality f the lower-classes and the resources and patronage of the rich. This inspired the French Impressionist painter Toulouse-Lautrec to sustain the Moulin Rouge’s energetic, sexy democratic vision forever in the captured light and color of his paintings. Can-Can dancers would never have been considered a class fit to paint until the Impressionists. Although Toulouse-Lautrec’s physical deformity plays a grotesquely comic role in Luhrmann’s film, his art and the experience that illuminated it are nowhere on screen. The genuinely radical cultural phenomenon of the Moulin Rouge inspired the creation of two major film works that never register on Luhrmann’s supposedly post-modern antenna. Jean Renoir’s The French Can-Can is simply one of the greatest films ever made. His formal daring established a unique, revolutionary use of film language apropos to the story of the Moulin Rouge and the Can-Can creation. The successful cinematic rendering of the Impressionistic spirit and perspective is catalogued in his use of staging-in-depth, long takes, nudes, delicate Technicolor, idiosyncratic casting, and shots that end—rather than begin—with pictoral recreations of Impressionistic paintings (including those by his father, Auguste Renoir). Visionary aesthetics was Renoir’s theme and glorious accomplishment. Luhrmann’s genuflecting rapid cuts and abysmal Bollywood set designs challenge spectators to make impossible sense of his mise-en-scene, but he doesn’t challenge them to make fresh connections between or with images.
The Moulin Rouge setting serves a flashy anachronistic valentine to the self-involvement of an adolescent crush, mirrored by Luhrmann’s own self-indulgence. The bohemian Ewan McGregor’s romance with the courtesan Nicole Kidman follows one cliché—that is, lie—after another, complete with foppish, rich, sadistic Duke suitor competing for the hand of this prostitute. Critics like to call such cliches “archetypal”—but archetypes should be used as a structural basis for richer, deeper exploration of human experience. A true post-modern artist subverts such cliches. So idiotic is our artist hero that his jealousy—and cruelty—blinds him to the obvious fact that his beloved is dying of consumption. To find this endearing is pure narcissism. Feminists, be alert! This manipulatively sentimental plot twist marks another facile “archetype.” It’s a nod to La Boheme, the Puccini opera that Luhrmann’s staging made meaningless and emotionless by setting it in a Technicolor 1950s Paris that never seemed to have heard of Sartre, but was infused with the gaudy camp of that era’s Hollywood musicals.
Thus, McGregor’s “big talent” is reduced to a groaning pun about the size of his member (on display in Trainspotting, The Pillow Book and Velvet Goldmine.) Meanwhile, the only funny line in the movie is unintentional. Kidman expresses her dream: “I’m going to be a real actress.” Sorry, Nicole, it ain’t gonna happen. Luhrmann’s plot validates Kidman’s conceit as it focuses on the fallacious transformation of the Moulin Rouge into respectable theatre. The plot becomes a typical genre backstage romance that upholds the very elitist standards of art that the Moulin Rouge, the Impressionists, and the post-modernists meant to obliterate. When Kidman’s ex-hubby Tom Cruise says in Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible, “You’ve never seen me very upset,” the joke was on him—and on all the pretensions that he can act. There’s no such critical distance here. Luhrmann’s crass commercialism puts blinders on the millennial audience and burns them in his own vanity. Equally shallow in conception and realization, Luhrmann de-contextualizes film images (the moon out of Melies) and pop songs. His use of “Nature Boy” travesties Wong Kar-Wai’s expansive use of Nat King Cole in In the Mood for Love, and his placement of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is dull where Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome” would have been lacerating. Here, the images repulse and the songs suck. Luhrmann makes the most obvious, surface-level use of both—sapping both the originals and our relationship to them of any imaginative life. When Luhrmann needs a song about a prostitute, he picks “Roxanne”—which Eddie Murphy and Walter Hill discarded in the sequel to 48 Hours in favor of a more astute James Brown track. In the place of Luhrmann’s lurid, misogynist “Roxanne” tango, imagine a feminist and race-conscious visual deconstruction of Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer”. You’d have a true cinematic integration of the compressed, analytical aesthetic of the best music videos as well as a post-modernist toppling of a racist and sexist culture’s icon. You’d also have a different movie.
There’s a reason for this. Each ideologically loaded term in the film’s Bohemian dogma, “Freedom,” “Truth,” “Beauty,” and “Love,” Luhrmann transforms into mere commodified logos, as meaningful as McDonald’s golden arches. The dollar sign would be a more honest trademark for the way Luhrmann justifies Hollywood ideological ownership, exploitation and profit. The reduction of the Civil Rights Movement’s rallying cry of “Freedom” to the callous privilege of a Hollywood émigré hack to butcher pop history is unconscionable. “Truth” becomes the placating lie Hollywood has always delivered. “Beauty” is white and garish. “Love” is heterosexual and narcissistic. Unconsciously, one hopes (!) this is the ideology critics want to buy—and that they help to sell. Moulin Rouge returns them to the state of innocence (and ignorance) that first brought them to the movies. Doing so, they refute all “Freedom,” Truth,” “Beauty,” and Love” offered by the films they discovered beyond Hollywood hegemony—or sometimes buried within its deceptively impenetrable structures. This extends to such critics’ shared political and pop history. Because Luhrmann makes the appropriate, if “duh”, obvious connection between the Moulin Rouge and the Studio 54 disco, you realize that his anachronistic pastiche relegates Black and Queer experience back to the fringes of pop experience. The one Black character is a mute strongman, a circus freak, whose sole narrative purpose is to act as the white hero’s violent id. Appearing from the unconscious nowhere to save the white woman from being raped and to pummel her victimizer, he quickly returns to the safety of the spectator’s unconscious. Luhrmann’s spatial incoherence leaves gaps to be filled by spectators’ and critics’ deep-rooted prejudices. Gay males serve a typically condescending purpose of performing groping, idolizing back-up dances to an untalented white diva in the “Diamonds Are Forever/Material Girl” medley and, by extension, the all-male rendition of “Like a Virgin.” The incomprehensible editing turns Queers into abstractions that affirm hetero dominance and Queer subservience to the celluloid closet. It’s Madonna’s (slumming) co-optation of the Queer Black and Hispanic “Vogue” sub-culture all over again.
Kidman goes Vogue with a medley of Diamonds Are Forever/Material Girl
A real artist, as with Renoir’s class-consciousness, would have recognized that the individuals in these minority cultures represent the modern equivalent of the Can-Can dancers and lower-class models of the Impressionists. Critics should know better (and audiences deserve better). Accounting for the conscious pleasure critics find in the film reveals no less disturbing impulses. Consider the instructive sequence in which McGregor and the Bohemians rehearse (and write) the Switzerland-set rough version of the musical they will eventually perform at the Moulin Rouge. The artists struggle to complete the song lyric: “The hills are alive with…: In full “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” glory, McGregor belts out, “the sound of music!” The Bohemians, and critics, rejoice: they know a crass commercialist when they see one. The scene consciously plays off of audience sentimentality and cynicism. This cake-and-eating-it-too manipulation defines the allure of Luhrmann’s high-concept technique (and Sartre spins another revolution in his grave.) The truly revolutionary juxtaposition a filmmaker (say, punk auteur Alex Cox) might make between the Sound of Music setting and a song like Morrissey's vibrantly terrifying "The national Front Disco" would have thrown audiences back into an existential groove: a coddling pop lie snagged by the awful truth. Imagine the pitch: "Brecht meets Sartre." (Babe, that don't sell.) Of Morrisey’s album, “Your Arsenal”, White wrote: “Most people feel no compelling desire to understand fascists and racists and so won’t face the huge challenge of ‘Your Arsenal’. But there will only be delusion—no hope for progress-until they do.” Morrissey, who performed the song in concert with an Elvis Presley backdrop, knew that to “understand fascists and racists” meant to scrutinize one’s own relationship to pop iconography. Luhrmann favors delusion. The acclaim for Moulin Rouge invites us to boogie down at the National Front Disco. The White essay on “Your Arsenal” was reprinted as part of his epochal anthology: “The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture that Shook the World”. That most profound volume on the state of pop culture catalogued the 1984-94 era’s interplay of reactionary politics and aesthetics while intending to unify the scattered sources of dissent (from Hip-Hop and punk to De Palma, Hill, Cox, and Terence Davies.) Luhrmann totally ignores that “resistance” in our recent pop history, even as he co-opts that force’s post-modern aesthetic, reflected in the way one critic de-politicized Black culture’s “call and response” to hail Moulin Rouge as the second coming of the musical. White concluded his book with an essay on Pulp Fiction titled “An Idiot’s Delight.” His next volume might well track the waning of The Resistance from Pulp Fiction’s acclaimed misapplication of New Wave and blaxploitation tropes to Moulin Rouge’s heralded eradication of post-modern meaning. I suggest the following title, derived from the stupefying speech impediment John Leguizamo here gives Toulouse-Lautrec in his repeated mantra: “The Revowution” Just last year, Davies’ House of Mirth was a superlative example of post-modern filmmaking. His intricate expropriation, that is liberation, of John Singer Sargent paintings, Edith Wharton novels, and Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Amberson explored capitalism’s class-gender-and sexuality-based mechanisms of cultural oppression. Davies garnered acclaim from the very critics that now tout Moulin Rouge. What accommodates this apparent critical hypocrisy is the “revewation” that Moulin Rouge imparts. Moulin Rouge signifies the total capitalist consolidation of post-modernism. Here’s a new rallying cry for the truly radical: “Start the Revowution without me!” |
Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor star in Moulin Rouge
Doing the Can Can at the Moulin Rouge 
Every character is a caricature, shot in fish-bowl close-ups with monstrous make-up—a total aesthetic breach with artists from Toulouse-Lautrec to Renoir. There’s a notable exception: the two white heterosexual lovers. Luhrmann gives them the soft-focus, glamour lighting that Fosse exposed as Hollywood fascism in the “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” number in Cabaret.
Rouge director Baz Luhrmann 
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