The pitch song -- which has resulted in some of the most memorable moments in screen history -- serves important functions, all of them evident in "Moulin Rouge": a celebration of theater and make-believe, a goal for the third act and a plot that unites a motley group of unrelated songs, in this case songs lifted from India's steamy film musicals. The genius behind this kind of musical, MGM producer Arthur Freed, had collections of leftover songs lying around; he hauled in writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green to link them together into "Band Wagon" and "Singin' in the Rain." (Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Lerner and Loewe, never wrote this kind of musical; their songs always belonged to a coherent plot.)

An original tune in "Moulin Rouge," "Someday I'll Fly Away," is what Disney animation used to call the "page 20 want song." It tells us what the girl or boy (or mermaid) really wants and will spend the movie trying to get: marriage ("Someday My Prince Will Come"), escape from a mundane life ("Something's Coming") or even just legs ("I Want to Be Where the People Are").

The Paris created by Catherine Martins, the production designer of "Moulin Rouge," belongs to that handful of visionary films in which, as Ridley Scott said of his own "Blade Runner," "The script is the set design." I hope Martins' work won't go unrecognized because she happens to compete in a year full of hobbits and wizards. The fabulous design of "Moulin Rouge" harks back to a time when movies were movies and life was life. No one thought, in the 1930s, that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were dancing in real rooms. Josef von Sternberg created a fictional Shanghai on the Paramount backlot for the lustrous "Shanghai Express" (1932); later, traveling in China, he was gratified to see how different it was from the one he had made.

This may be where the "Moulin Rouge" lovers and haters part company. Many of us demand that movies be realistic, even though that involves a mode as artificial as anything in "Moulin Rouge." Dissolves, long lenses, drop focus, fast film, Foley sound effects, digital manipulation, production design that painstakingly mimics the ordinary -- all these techniques spell "naturalism" to us, the "real" in film. Maybe some people can't dwell emotionally in a world that does not conform to a film-based realism as rigid as the neoclassical paintings of Ingres or David, the brittle 19th century works against which the impressionists rebelled. In this environment, the movie musical survived the past two decades only by reverting to children's cartoons.

Part of the brilliance of "Moulin Rouge" is that Luhrmann leads us by the hand -- jaded, visually saturated and reality-spoiled viewers that we are -- into a world that not only doesn't exist but never could. The moment our 1900 hero opens his mouth and sings a song that everyone knows was in a 1964 film, Luhrmann is telling us that we're in his world now. There are different rules in his world: people sing the songs you know. A green fairy becomes her own chorus line and sprinkles green fairy dust on our still-singing heroes, now in top hats, who fly into the roiling Moulin Rouge. Either you take Luhrmann's hand and hold on tight or you let go, like the child in a fairytale, and are lost forever.

For me, holding on through three viewings and the DVD (in which you can see marvelously complete versions of the dances), "Moulin Rouge" belongs in a group of rare films -- "The Red Shoes," "An American in Paris," "Singin' in the Rain," "The Band Wagon," "West Side Story," "Cabaret" -- that transform dance and music into a form unique to the screen.

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