Love, Song, and Lots of Cuts

Here at the Cannes Film Festival, rather unfairly, Baz Luhrmann's opening night extravaganza Moulin Rouge has become a bit of what psychologists call the "bad object" in comparison with Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie From Montmartre, a film not even officially in the festival. Both Jeunet and Luhrmann work the same location (the Montmartre section of Paris) and the same technique (visual and aural imaginative overload). Since Luhrmann's film suffers a bit by this comparison, it should therefore do much better critically in New York this weekend, where it doesn't have Jeunet's film to contend with. It's also proper, I think, to remember that it was Luhrmann who gave us such powerfully cinematic re-imaginings as Strictly Ballroom and William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet; it's just that he may finally be too imaginative for his own good.

Moulin Rouge is a brilliant and delightful hymn to the turn of the century home of the can-can and all things quintessentially "Parisian," derived not so much from the movies (that's the Jeunet film), as from older forms of popular culture such as the music hall and advertising posters. The impoverished and tubercular bohemian artists of all stripes and qualities, so familiar from such cultural icons as Puccini's opera "La Bohème," are celebrated here by Luhrmann with gusto and great fondness. Ewan MacGregor plays Christian, a naïve young poet drawn to Montmartre's reputation as an artistic center, where he encounters such high-octane characters as the midget painter Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo). He meets and falls in love with Satine (Nicole Kidman), a prostitute and chanteuse, who is dying of tuberculosis and who is forced by poverty to sell her love to the highest bidder, in this case the Duke of Worcester (Richard Roxburgh). The Duke has entered into an agreement with the impresario Zidler (Jim Broadbent) to underwrite a play conceived by Christian in which Satine stars, provided he has exclusive access to her favors, sexual and otherwise.

If the plot sounds rather clichéd, that's all part of Luhrmann's endlessly fascinating deconstruction of his material. One the one hand, the film's a lavishly mounted musical with some wonderful numbers, but on the other, he insists, quite entertainingly, on introducing such anachronistic music as Madonna's "Like a Virgin" and "Material Girl," Phil Collins' "One More Night," Sting's "Roxanne," and Elton John's "One Day I'll Fly Away," along with a host of others. But since part of his intentionally nefarious scheme is to destroy rigid chronology altogether, such mid-twentienth-century show classics like "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" and "The Sound of Music" are also thrown into the mix.

On the visual and aural front, Luhrmann also keeps things hopping, as he goes to great lengths to stamp out every possible soupçon of realism. Digital effects are employed with such brio that we're consistently entertained, from the opening conceit of a conductor leading an orchestra accompanying a silent film to an ending in which all the stops are pulled out. The editing is so fast and furious that it's clear that the film contains more cuts than any other film of the past decade, with the possible exception of Luhrmann's own previous films.

And therein lies the rub. As a critic friend of mine put it, simply and directly, if you're looking at Nicole Kidman, why would you want to cut away? While both Kidman and McGregor are gorgeous to look at, in other words, the film consistently runs the danger of substituting cool but ultra-hyper, modern special effects for boring old human sentiment. Even while you're luxuriating in the film's techniques for the first thirty minutes, you're also uncomfortably aware than no mere human, even Baz Luhrmann, is going to be able to sustain the emotional intensity, through effects alone, over the course of two hours.

And for this viewer, at least, Luhrmann doesn't, finally. Still, he gives it a helluva shot, and the film is consistently witty and entertaining. But does it have a heart? Ultimately, each viewer will have to decide for him or herself whether the love story really works despite the obvious appeal of the lovers. And if you decide that it doesn't, all the effects in the world won't be able to redeem it.