I’d never seen Moulin Rouge! before. When the trailer came out, back in the day, I just thought, ach, I don’t fancy that. However, in the intervening years this has now meant 1 demerit point on my queer card, so when the GYFF had it as its closing film, I thought I’d rectify that.
The start was everything I thought it might be, full of slo mo and the ghost-train judder shots Baz Luhrmann loves so well. Songs playing over each other simultaneously, everything loud, everything bright, everything extra as fuck. I kept thinking about John Waters, and a quote I could only half remember, “If less is more, think how much more more would be”. Frenetic, tacky, cacophonous, it was exactly the Moulin Rouge! I expected. My granny watched it on TV once back in the 2000s and pronounced, “Whaever made that Moulin Rouge must be oan that co-caine”. My gran was right on the money.
However, once the film calms its tits, and we drift into the second act, I found myself slowly warming to it. Ewan McGregor’s naive young lover is disarmingly endearing, and Nicole Kidman plays the woman marked for doomed love with a mix of cool, sleek chic and nervous heartfluttering. I of course never sympathise with the right people, and just felt sorry for the Duke, who tries to make all Satine’s (Kidman) dreams come true, only to find out she’s making a fool out of him in front of the whole company, just to milk him dry. As the love triangle ramped up, I found myself thinking, well, it’s no my cup of tea, but it’s no bad.
Finally the melodrama reached its long-telegraphed crescendo, and the audience around me descended into sniffles, sighs and sobbing. And you know, as overwrought as the whole thing was, McGregor and Kidman just save it with excellent performances, they just commit despite the ludicrousness of everything around them. And I have to say I could sit through it again, I actually enjoyed myself.
The big thing that no one talks about is race in Moulin Rouge. The almost entirely white cast perform a play about an Indian courtesan and maharaja in stage brown-face, while the only Black cast member is named Chocolate. Yikes.
The other thing, more a plot hole, is if you find out someone has TB, you definitely do tell them, so they can make the decision about whether to continue swapping spit with the person they love. Plus, she’s huffing and puffing and belting out all these song numbers all over the top of the rest of the company, and you don’t think *maybe* it might be a better idea to tell her to no do that coz she’s got a highly contagious, fatal disease?
Outside of those, Moulin Rouge! is just a great big sing-along, bombastic, gaudy, and operatically over-the-top. And that enthusiasm is so infectious, it eventually just took me with it.