Moulin Rouge! - 2001

I don’t like this movie, sorry but I don’t. I don’t like how it’s made, with the camera shots moving erratically here and there, with the exaggerated colours… also I don’t like the story, but that’s basically the Traviata story, without the good that comes with the opera. 

The lead character is Christian (Ewan McGregor) who writes the story, telling us what happened since he came to Paris from England a year before. The opening credits were nice, black and white, it was a good start, with a song introducing the story. It’s Paris, 1900. The Moulin Rouge was a “night-club and bordello” (I didn’t know bordello was used in English too) where the rich and powerful used the young and beautiful.

The most beautiful of all was of course Satine (Nicole Kidman, here she still had her long red hair, beautiful), a courtesan, called the Sparkling Diamond, who sold herself to men, he says. Christian cries, says he loved her (of course he says that, but that’s not love).

He tells us right away that she’s now dead. 

It all began in 1989, when he came to Paris to be a writer but didn’t know what to write. He wanted to write about love but had never been in love.

One day a man fell from the ceiling into his room, so Christian met a group of actors. He joined them, and won them with his words “the hills are alive with the sound of music”; their writer Audrey went away and he remained with them to write the play. Christian was yet unknown, had never written a play before, so Tolouse (John Leguizamo) suggests he should recite his poetry to Satine, and if she likes it she’ll convince Mr Zidler (Jim Broadbent). 

Christian speaks about love in song titles “love is a many-splendored thing, love lifts us up where we belong, all you need is love”, the thing someone says who doesn’t know what love is. 

They all go to the Moulin Rouge where she sings. The “we can cancan” song  scene is very noisy and full of aggressive colours, no doubt to show what a mess the Moulin Rouge is. Then there is silence because Satine arrives, singing ‘diamonds are a girl’s best friend’ with bits of ‘material girl’. Zidler has arranged a meeting between her and the Duke: she’s supposed to sleep with him to convince him to invest in the Moulin Rouge, and she could finally be a ‘real actress’. 

There’s an absurd moment when she mistakes Christian for the Duke and therefore invites him to dance with her, and then into her room. There’s a ridiculous scene when he thinks he’s there to recite poetry, while she makes weird noises and shouts at him to ‘free the tiger’…

He starts his poetry by reciting “it’s a little bit funny this feeling inside” while she rolls on the floor for some reason, maybe she thinks that’s provocative… then he starts singing to her, and she falls in love, and is so surprised and glad “I’m in love with a young talented Duke”.

Now of course the truth comes out, and Zidler comes taking the real Duke to see her. Christian hide, she acts very crazy so that the Duke won’t see him, and then she sends the Duke away saying they’ll have to wait till opening night… after all the exhaustion she faints in Christian’s arms, right when the Duke comes back. She tells him that they’re rehearsing, and the actors who were spying on Christian to see how it was going come in to help her with her lie.

The Duke asks what the play will be about, and Christian says “love overcoming all obstacles; in India, a beautiful courtesan…” etc, basically their own story, the love for a penniless sitar player while the maharaja wants her too.

While explaining the story they all sing the “so exciting” bit, which would have been nice had it been all in one shot or maybe just one long sequence of all the actors together, but instead it was a close-up on a face-followed by a very quick close up on another face, for a long time, it made me feel unwell :-/

Anyway, the Duke says he likes it and wants to invest. They’re all happy, Satine sings “one day I’ll fly”. Christian goes to her to thank her for the job and talk about when she said she was in love with him. “I’m a courtesan, I lied” she says, adding “a girl’s got to eat”.

He sings pieces here and there about love, and wins her over.

The Duke is jealous, says that by contract Satine is his!

Satine and Christian become secret lovers right under their noses, until Zidler finds it out and tells her to stop it. Both the Duke and Christian demand to see her that night, but “sickness is tougher than jealousy, stronger than love”, and she’ll meet nobody that night.

Zidler sings “she’ll be yours” with bits of “like a virgin”, and the Duke joins in and sings too. 

The doctor tells Zidler that Satine is dying, she has consumption. This was Zidler’s sweetest moment, when he said “my little sparrow is dying?”.

Satine tells Christian that she was unwell that night,  that’s why she didn’t go to meet him, but he doesn’t believe her, he’s so jealous :-/

She tries to end it, saying that she’ll have to sleep with the Duke sooner or later and he’ll suffer too much because he’ll be so jealous, but he convinces her and they don’t break up.

While rehearsing, they sing together “I’ll love you till the end of time”; the Duke is unhappy, a girl put in his ear the doubt that Satine might be in love with Christian (and she knows what she is, no need to use words on her, and is probably happy about it), so the Duke wants to change the story, says that the courtesan should choose the maharaja who’s giving her the world, until Christian shouts as loud as he can “she doesn’t love you!” the stupid little boy. 

The Duke is now tired of waiting, he wants Satine now, and of course Christian is terribly jealous. 

The Argentinian actor dances a tango with a girl while singing Roxanne.

Satine can’t pretend as easily as she used to, he gets angry, takes his gifts back, becomes violent, tries to take her by force, but Chocolat saves her, hitting him on the head. 

The Duke tells Zidler that unless she goes to him, he’ll have the boy killed. Zidler tells her, what can he do? He also tells her that she’s dying: “save him, make him believe you don’t love him”-“hurt him to save him”.

Zidler sings “the show must go on”. Satine tells Christian ‘the Duke offered me everything, I can’t see you anymore, the Moulin Rouge is my home, the truth is I am the Hindi courtesan and I choose the maharaja’

Chistian is mad jealous; Toulouse tells him he saw it in her, he knows she loved him, but of course Christian doesn’t listen to him; instead he says that he had to know and that’s why he went back to the Moulin Rouge.

The show is on, and when the Argentinian actor falls again he takes his place and goes to Satine, showing how shitty he is and she still loves him, I just can’t! (And some people wonder why women still love the MrDarcy character so much: maybe because after she rejected him in such a way he went ‘this is what you think of me’, and worked to show her who he really was, he didn’t go: ‘how dare you reject me?’ , he didn’t offend her, didn’t call her names, didn’t talk about her in a rude way…).

After so many void words of endless love, now Christian goes to her to say “I’ve come to pay my bill” and to keep insulting her. On stage, he says to the Duke “she’s yours, I’ve paid my whore” and they don’t throw him out with a good kick, no no, as if he had any right to talk like that. They called him ‘penniless writer’ at the beginning, but he still has a good home to go back to if he wants, and even if he didn’t have a job he had a place to stay and food to eat… what does he know about ‘need’ ??? Or about love for that matter, because that’s not love, not at all, that’s just a child throwing a tantrum, that’s a spoiled child crying that he wants something and whoever doesn’t give him what he wants is ‘bad’… basically he loved her as soon as she did whatever he told her to do, but insulted her as soon as she left him…..

When he starts walking away, she sings to him to get him back, not knowing that the Duke’s hitman is trying to kill him (honestly, the hitman moving through the dancers and the musicians to get his gun back was the only funny bit). He fails though.

Christian smiles, Satine falls sick, he can see her coughing blood, understand she’s dying. He cries.

Months go by then he decided to write his story about ‘love’.. :-/  She really loved him, he never really loved her!