I wasn’t really looking forward to seeing Moulin Rouge. Starring Ewan McGregor, Nicole Kidman, and John Leguizamo, Moulin Rouge promises it is about truth, beauty, freedom, and above all things – love. Now, my usual taste in movies would generally preclude me from going anywhere near this movie with a 10 foot pole (a musical about love!?), but I’d heard many good things about it along the grapevine and boldy ventured forth to see it.
The story is set in the seedy (but romantic) bohemian underground of Paris on or around the year 1900. Ewan’s character Christian is a young, idealistic dude from England who has come to Pairs for a variety of reasons (most of which are to do with love, and stuff, but also it appears to piss his father off). Fate, as it tends to, throws him into directly into the heart of the throbbing mass of the bohemian scene.
The Moulin Rouge itself is a nightclub (and bordello, perhaps?); a bustling visually extravagant establishment which offers a variety of entertainments to its customers. The jewel of the Moulin Rouge is Satine (Nicole Kidman), the stunningly beautiful lead dancer and singer.
As the result of mistaken identity, Christian and Satine end up meeting and interacting, and as you’ve guessed unless you’re incredibly stupid, emotional sparks begin to fly like woodchips being thrown into their air by a beaver on benzedrine. The love story plot is fairly traditionally in a Romeo / Juliet tragic sort of way, and thus fairly easily predictable if you’ve ever seen a movie before in your life, but the presentation is so good that you almost don’t even notice.
The focus of the movie is, of course, the music and singing. Both Nicole and Ewan (allegedly) sing their own parts, and the result is extremely impressive. If, like me, you expected really boring, overly operatic and theatrical music, you’ll be pleasantly surprised that most of the music is in fact based on contemporary tunes. Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, for example, features in one of the scenes. The entire musical score is quite simply excellent and is enough of a feature to make the movie stand out all on its own.
The costumes, dancing, effects and scenery are all very well done as well; everything is very complementary to the story. The script is very well done and actually really funny – combined with several well placed singing scenes, you’ll get a very good chuckle out of several scenes in the movie. And, Nicole Kidman is incredibly good looking in the whole movie.
Overall: definitely worth checking out. Yes, I know it doesn’t have Bruce Willis in it, and there’s no explosions or any sort of serious gunplay, so its way out of my league, but despite this its a very entertaining romp both visually and musically. A very fun movie to watch, depsite the usual message that most tragedies have – no matter how well things seem to be working out, love sucks and will always end horribly.