NOT A SPOILER!!!!!!!
"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return."
What do I say about this movie? How do I explain it without giving too much away?
It's beautiful.
It's artistic.
It's powerful.
It's magnificent.
It's a musical - I mean really, truly a musical, like Grease or The Sound of Music, where the songs tell parts of the story. Not like the things we call musicals today, that just happen to have lots of songs in them. Actually, I think if you combine The King and I, Velvet Goldmine, and Sweeney Todd, you might have some idea of what mood this movie conveys - but only some.
It is sometimes hilarious, sometimes glamorous, sometimes tragic. Some of it is very real, some is completely absurd - but that absurdity is part of the reality of that world: a night club in turn-of-the-century Paris.
It was brought to us by the director of Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet. The early scene where Christian falls in with the bohemians- or should I say, when "an unconscious Argentinean and a dwarf dressed as a nun" fall through Christian's roof - is every thing I've come to expect from Australian cinema, due in part to this director: colorful, flashy, and delightfully absurd.
There was another movie called Moulin Rouge, which I have not seen but I'm told is about the life of artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. This one is not. He's in it (played by John Leguizamo), but it's not about him.
It's about Satine (Nicole Kidman), a courtesan who wants to be an actress. Promos said, "All men wanted her; one man dared to love her." So it's also about that man: Christian (Ewan McGregor), a writer who came from London to Paris's Montmartre district to follow the bohemian lifestyle.
It's about beauty.
It's about freedom.
It's about truth.
Most of all, it's about love.
The singing was fantastic. Nicole Kidman should do more musicals, or at least sing more in her movies. (My husband adds that she should do more in her underwear. Along those lines, the CNN movie critic says that we should all be grateful that Ewan McGregor keeps his clothes on, but I tend to disagree.) I really hope that Ewan McGregor has quit smoking, otherwise he won't be able to sing like this much longer.
The songs, on the whole, are quite familiar - pop songs by Madonna, Queen, Elton John, Sting. Only they were changed enough to actually become part of the script rather than background music or gratuitous noise. A few extra words here, a change in the intonation there, and most importantly, the fact that the characters sang to each other and with each other. There were some original songs- the bit to the tune of that well-known can-can song, where they're explaining the plot of the play they're writing to The Duke (Richard Roxburgh), who they hope will give them money for production; and Satine's One Day I'll Fly Away, in which she sings of her dreams and how love doesn't fit into them. David Bowie's Nature Boy fits so perfectly as the opening and closing narrative that I thought it had been written just for the film; its mysterious tone and haunting melody remind me of the song of the Time Prophet from the Lexx episode "Brigadoom." Both are songs that I find difficult to sing but impossible to forget.
As far as the staging, it was always decorative, always colorful, always surreal. The occasional extra sparkles, the walking on clouds, and the singing moon lend just enough unreality to remind us that we're not watching the story occur as in most movies; rather, we are being told the story after it happened by Christian sitting at his typewriter making a novel of it.
The CNN movie critic complained that the pace was often so frantic that you couldn't take it all in, that important emotional moments were washed over in the shuffle. But in the primary scene that's like that, the main character is drugged, so that's probably how it looked to him. Heck, he was drugged and from England - that had to be how it looked to him! Generally, if the audience doesn't have time to absorb everything, it's because the characters don't either. How can we really get into it if we don't feel the same way they do? In most movies, this emotional connection is made through music and sound effects, but in a musical, you have to do it with the visuals.
There is so much more I'd like to say, but I can't, not when someone who hasn't seen it yet will read this. So I will finish with this:
I've never anticipated the release of a movie as much as I did this one, not even The Phantom Menace. I was not disappointed.