MOULIN ROUGE! (2001)  ***

Reviewed 12/22/01

Both a throwback to musicals of yesteryear and the embracing and surpassing of today’s MTV music aesthetic, MOULIN ROUGE is a marvel of film technique.  Rapid-fire editing, a soaring camera, marvelously interwoven special visual effects, too many lighting tricks to name, and some of the most astonishing costumes and set design in recent memory propel the audience into a mythical turn-of-the-century Paris.  All the flash and blare cleverly does not hide the fact that the base material is pure artifice, albeit entertaining artifice.  And the movie doesn’t try to hide it.  The villain, after all, sports a Snidely Whiplash moustache.

The movie employs music as disparate as “Silly Love Songs” to “Material Girl” to “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and plays well with the central idea behind musicals, that of characters bursting into song as an expression of emotional state of being.  On the other hand, one of the best sequences has the cast coming up with a musical’s story on the spur of the moment and selling it to the nefarious Duke.   The relentless need to dazzle works surpassingly well when the movie is being cute, but it eventually grows wearisome, and the tragic elements in the second half play heavy-handedly, especially compared to the lighter tone in the first half.  Still, this is the best musical since SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT.