When Left to My Own Devices, I Watch Moulin Rouge!

If you know me very well at all, you know that my wife travels a good bit for work and that when she does I tend to descend into a directionless heap of quasi-bachelor decrepitude. On the rare occasions that I go into work while she's gone my friends will say things like "do you feel alright? you look terrible..." It's because I don't sleep, either barely eat or eat total trash, and generally exist in a semi-perpetual fugue state. My wife is traveling right now, and as a way of passing the time I decided to put on a movie that never ceases to captivate my attention: Baz Luhrmann's musical pastiche Moulin Rouge! 

The movie came out fourteen years ago. Highly stylized films of the kind that Luhrmann has made his bread and butter can tend to lose their fastball over time, but Moulin Rouge! has held up extremely well. In part because, unlike other Luhrmann films that have not held up quite so well, Rouge explores at every turn what happens when art emerges out of stylized environments. The very first scene where Ewan McGregor's Christian finds the lyrics to the sound of music is a perfect example. Highfalutin phrases like "The hills are made with the euphonious symphonies of descant..." are tossed back and forth amongst the bohemians who are intent on finding the most modern possible expression of the simple idea. When Christian bursts into "The Sound of Music," however, everything else stops, and for a moment in the midst of the stylized chaos there is just a voice, and McGregor's impossibly handsome face, and the world just melts away.

Something similar happens in the scene where Christian wooes Nicole Kidman's Satine with a rendition of Elton John's "Your Song." She has been rolling around on the floor pretending that his awkward attempts to find the proper lane of his poetry has driven her into orgiastic ecstasy. But the moment he begins to sing, and his ten billion volt smile starts to shine, she is dumbstruck. The expression on her face as her "performance" gives way to his is, perhaps, the greatest bit of acting in Kidman's career (and she is one of the finest actresses of her generation). You see her fall in love without ever saying a word, all through minor adjustments of expression that begin with wonder, and ends in a kind of comfortable and yet passionate realization. The underlying ethos here is that love is not bound up in the modernistic aesthetic trappings of the Parisian bohemians, but is about something much simpler, two beautiful people (and you would be hard pressed to find two people more beautiful in 2001 than Kidman and McGregor), lovely and emotionally straightforward words, and simple melodies that find a way to cut through all the clutter. While it might not come through at first glance it is hard to imagine a starker indictment of Toulouse-Lautrec and the modernist aesthetic than the one that Luhrmann offers here. 

Luhrmann made Romeo + Juliet, so it is saying something to say that Moulin Rouge! is his most profound meditation on the nature of love. It is also, speaking more broadly, his best film (unless you are one of those Jackman-ites who rides of Australia, or the one person who was really into The Great Gatsby. The rest of Luhrmann's career suggests that the insights of Rouge were more accidental than intentional, but if that is the case then we should all just be that much more glad that it was such a felix culpa.