Like "Cabaret," to which it owes a huge debt, "Moulin Rouge" begins with a British (in this case, Scottish) innocent in Europe. (McGregor even arrives at the train station in the same way Michael York does in "Cabaret.") Set loose in the capital of art and depravity, this young man is taken in hand by a girl, the star of an enclosed world from which she longs to escape. As in "The Red Shoes," young love must compete with a soulless, self-defined world for the heart of this talented, beautiful, morally divided girl, on whom everyone -- particularly a craven, manipulative impresario -- depends. As in every Marlene Dietrich film directed by von Sternberg (or every one except "Blonde Venus"), poverty is handsome and power is ugly and they compete and confuse everyone.

This movie references other movies the way Shakespeare references the Bible. And it's not just showing off: During the pitch song, Ziegler, the impresario played by Jim Broadbent, sings the villain's part and Satine remarks: "Oh, Harold, no one can play him like you can." Ziegler replies: "No one's going to." For those who recognize it, this lift from "The Band Wagon" tells us that Ziegler is the film's soul-stealing Mephistopheles.

Two great Hitchcock love scenes simultaneously wrap around the climactic lovers' duet between Kidman and McGregor (a Dolly Parton song made famous by Whitney Houston). We see both the fireworks that frame Cary Grant and Grace Kelly's embrace in "To Catch a Thief" and the 360-degree shot around Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, locked in a kiss, in "Vertigo." McGregor's startling rendition of Stewart's hoarse accusation from the "Vertigo" tower scene -- "You learned your part very well" -- invokes that betrayal of love just as Satine's enraged lover pushes her up the stairs. It's like a jazz musician's quote of another master's tune for an audience aware of both.

Luhrmann and Bilcock edit musically. Luhrmann is a cinematic equivalent of Gustav Mahler, who composed for enormous orchestras but created climaxes in which perhaps only three instruments play. At each climax, like a long intake of breath before the dive, we wait -- and the finish explodes. Satine faints on the trapeze at the penultimate word of her number. In the "Roxanne" tango, the entire Moulin Rouge -- boy, Duke, dancers and the girl herself -- must wait to see if Satine will save the show by betraying the man she loves. At the height of the Bollywood-style closing extravaganza, Kidman sings a fragile a cappella call across a silent room. Luhrmann knows how to use silence.

No American male that I know thinks of Kidman as a sex goddess. She is not our Dietrich or Marilyn Monroe or Greta Garbo -- mostly because no one is -- but also because her best roles have always been as an extremely tough cookie, a cold and scary manipulator of men. Part of the miracle of "Moulin Rouge" is to give Kidman the warmth on screen that I suspect she has always craved. The ice queen melteth. In her earliest scenes, she uncannily resembles Ann Margaret (who also yearned to be a real actress) and then Claudette Colbert, the cheerful, comic sacrificial lamb. Yet by the time Dietrich's veil shadows her face or, like Garbo's Camille, she falls to the floor, with her lover throwing money at her, we believe she's just a girl in love. Who wouldn't be, with McGregor singing to you night and day? The man can act more convincingly singing his heart out than most actors can just standing and talking.

The only realism in "Moulin Rouge" is emotional. It survives comedy scenes so extreme that sound effects accompany the actors turning their heads. In his autobiography, Jean Renoir, who directed "French Can Can" in 1955 as a direct rebuke to John Huston's "Moulin Rouge" of two years before (both films are actually rather leaden, except for their blazing dance sequences) wrote, "It is possible to be improbable and still true." In this sense, "Moulin Rouge" is true. Its visual universe is complete, its aural universe is adept and its exploration of both is entirely cinematic. At its core, it is a most amazing thing, a love story we believe.

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