Moulin Rouge is perhaps the best musical ever. That is, of course, if you are in your early twenties and have never seen another musical before! Undoubtedly the contrivance to revive a dead and forgotten film genre, this "musical- virtually fashions a new template for modern audiences. Devoid of many beloved attributes of the generic musical, director Baz Luhrmann stumbles into a spoof of an opera, retaining little association with the classical precedent. Compared with such a precedent in My Fair Lady, we discover that besides infuriating historical puritans and those who enjoy only sedate films, Moulin Rouge is reduced to an overly staged music video.
If eliciting a deeper meaning behind the songs in effort to pilot a powerful message marks a necessary syntactic characteristic of the musical genre, Moulin Rouge fails. Nothing more than simple dialog written around dated love songs, the flashy package conceals no genuine plot content. In 1899, a young poet named Christian leaves his family's home and heads off to the Montmartre district of Paris where he falls into the debauched bohemian world of painter Toulouse-Lautrec. When he is enlisted to write a routine for the Moulin Rouge nightclub, he soon falls for the club's star, a courtesan named Satine. Instead of developing their love story through the course of the plot, they immediately sleep together (the modern place-holder for love), and spend the rest of the film combating an insubstantial yet entirely predictable crisis. Ostensibly and appropriately representative of today's society, it articulates nothing of true love, despite that being the film's motto.
Better than the enchanting camera-chemistry between Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, the sharing of time together "leading to maturation of true love between Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrington's characters in My Fair Lady "gives us understanding and enables us to relate.