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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
In an age when movie musicals are mostly children's cartoons, Baz Luhrmann's "Moulin Rouge" brilliantly reinvents the genre and opens the door to a new cinematic style. So why didn't the critics get it?
Feb 7, 2002 | I love "Moulin Rouge." Other people don't. I don't understand these people. Perhaps none of them got to see the movie the way it (and all great movies) was meant to be seen, on an enormous screen, with a sold-out crowd, in the kind of cavernous theater that only a handful of big cities have anymore.
The moment Ewan McGregor, clad in lederhosen and a silly hat, burst into "The Hills Are Alive," the whole theater bought it completely. We laughed when men in tuxedos sang "Smells Like Teen Spirit" while colliding with girls in lace colors you never imagined. We applauded the dance numbers. When a threadbare song, ruined from decades of radio overplay, suddenly sprang from our young poet: "My gift is my song -- and this one's for you," it was like hearing it for the first time.
How wonderful life is while you're in the world. Admit it -- you know you're in love when you're not only listening to those soft hits on the radio, you're agreeing with them. The first love duet between the courtesan Satine (Nicole Kidman) and her poet lover is swathed in swatches of such hits. One critic (I've forgotten who) faulted the incompleteness, the fragmentary quality, as if it were a flaw. In fact, it's an unerring sense of the shared emotional scale of each FM hit song. "Moulin Rouge" director Baz Luhrmann seems to know precisely how much of each tune we need to hear (not much) before the pleasurable shock of recognition sinks in. (And it is a pleasure. An audible gasp shot through the Ziegfeld Theater in New York when the hot-blooded Argentinean actor, explaining to the heartbroken poet the agony of loving a prostitute, slowly builds a tango which becomes, within two syllables, the instantly recognizable "Roxanne.")
Other words from other reviewers -- like "potpourri" or "anachronism" or "mélange" -- misread Luhrmann's mastery of a different vocabulary for a different purpose. It doesn't matter that Nirvana, Nat King Cole, the Police and Madonna are sung in the wrong context, by a singer of the wrong gender and at the wrong time. These songs have their unity in the great electronic now of radio, Walkmans, jukeboxes: the collective shared present we can hear, continuously, somewhere at any given moment in the world. I once heard "Fire and Rain" in a taxi in Beijing. If life were a musical, these would be the songs we'd sing. Not least because we already know all the words.
Luhrmann does something very old -- the musical -- in a very new way. We live in a real world of constant visual stimulation, a riot of competing electronic images. To get our attention, visual material must be faster, must capture our peripheral vision. Luhrmann and his editor, Jill Bilcock, grasp how abrupt the pace needs to be to hold our ravaged attention spans. With so much to see, the glimpse becomes its own unit. I call this furious visual field -- the Web, TV, video games, flat screens, movies like this one -- glimpse culture. "Moulin Rouge" is a glimpse musical. So we don't get entire dances, we don't get entire songs. We don't need them.
The editing style of "Moulin Rouge" seems to stun people who don't understand that ever since Bob Fosse, editors on dance movies double as choreographers. The edit is the dance. Bilcock, like her colleagues on "All That Jazz," "Fame" and "Flashdance" -- all of whom won Oscars for editing -- surely deserves Academy recognition this year.
Luhrmann and his co-writer, Craig Pearce, anchor this imagery with traditional ballast, swiftly established: Boy meets girl, sings to girl, kisses girl, loses girl, girl sings, boy and girl sing together, love arrives. The show must go on, since this is not just a musical, but that peculiar branch of musical that exists only in the movies: "Let's put on a show." Central to such movies is the "pitch song," in which eager showfolk throw themselves into a rough-and-ready version of the play to come ("That's Entertainment" in "The Band Wagon" would be the classic example).
