There is a moment in “Moulin Rouge” when I felt moved by an old tune once sang by the Police now part of a brilliant medley typifying the unique perspective achieved by this truly original film. The music, especially “Roxanne,” is so effective and so oddly personal to many viewers that it alone could carry a lesser movie.

      I was in high school when I rented “All that Jazz.” Roy Scheider made an impression on me in something called “Blue Thunder” (yes, I once played with Micronauts and read comics religiously while sipping Jolt Cola and listening to Queen) and I had been strangely bewitched by Bob Fosse’s work in the okay “Star 80.” Of course, like everyone, I was exposed to “Cabaret” years earlier.

      Although I painfully admired “All that Jazz” at the time of first viewing it, I realize now that the film was too self-indulgent and really just too much not to mention dark and mean. The same could be partially said for “Moulin Rouge,” an opulent cornucopia of images and sounds that within ten minutes had my head spinning but in the end left my heart pounding.

      Nicole Kidman plays Satine a can can dancer in Paris around the turn of the century, 1900. She performs nightly before a drunken, stoned, lecherous crowd in an amazing club--the Moulin Rouge. Her trademark song is well known to us today and works well in the imaginary Paris digitally created spinning wildly at the audience from all angles. The digital city is better looking than anything in “Gladiator” and should put its creators in line for Oscar noms, but who cares, right?

      Actually, another somewhat similar film also named “Moulin Rouge” won Oscars for its art direction and costumes. That film, made in 1952, written and directed by John Huston and starring Jose’ Ferrer and Zsa Zsa Gabor, was based on the life of 19th Century painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Lautrec is featured in the 2001 film by the same name but not with the same tragic sensitivity of Huston’s classic.

      In “Moulin Rouge (2001),” Lautrec is played by John Leguizamo obviously on his knees (the real Lautrec was quite short in stature due to a childhood accident). While Lautrec is played early for slapstick he slowly takes on a more serious and significant role. This Lautrec sings lines from “Nature Boy” a tune once interpreted onto both the pop and R&B charts in 1948 by Nat King Cole. “The greatest thing you will ever learn is just to love and be loved in return,” is a central theme of the movie and never seems sappy or trite--it works.

      The story is direct and deliberate: Satine mistakens a young writer, Christian (played well by Jedi Ewan McGregor), as a Duke she is to sell herself to in order to elevate the Moulin Rouge and herself to more legitimate status. Satine has ambition to become a great and respected actress. Her manager and owner of the Moulin Rouge, Zidler, has ambitions, also, most of them centering around selling the sexy pleasures of Satine to the actual Duke in exchange for a huge capital investment in the Moulin Rouge. Love creeps into the equation when Satine actually falls for the writer and the jealousy of the Duke threatens to destroy everything.

      Aside from the Duke, all the characters seem to have real dimension. Zidler, for example, really cares for Satine which is touching. The writer is wide-eyed and innocent, and the rest of the cast of characters all offer insight headed by Lautrec complete with ample glasses of Absinthe.

      “Moulin Rouge (2001)” zips along with so much grace and exuberance complete with all the necessary elements to entertain, the parting comments of the young teens while they hastily exited the theater sporting exposed belly-buttons leaves me at a complete loss. I suppose even a sampling of the Material Girl isn’t enough for today’s youth, unless, of course, a tomb is raided or a hot air balloon is involved in a ridiculous rescue from a living flood. Alas, love used to be all one needed.

Jonathan W. Hickman, 2001