June 6, 2001

Moulin Rouge:
A Nonreview

So, Moulin Rouge.

Where do I even start?

(This is spoiler-free.)

I think I knew I would like this movie as it opened with the conductor of the orchestra and we were sitting way, way in the back and I squinted my eyes and imagined that those curtains were real curtains and I wasn't in a cinema but in a theater, a real live theater.

I think that imagining that was part of the reason I loved this movie. I didn't watch it as a movie, I guess. I watched it like I was watching a show, live, onstage, and somehow that made it seem even more magical.

It made me want to rush out in the rain and wind of an impending tropical storm to buy the soundtrack as Barnes and Noble closed. I stood breathlessly and wet before the cashier and practically choked, "Moulin Rouge"? The girl in front of me, who I assume had also just been at the movie, was buying it, too.

I could hardly see the road on the way home, it was raining so hard. I turned up Ewan McGregor singing "Your Song" as loud as it would go. Somehow it seemed so appropriate to listen to that song loud in the driving rain as lightning lit up the trees and the sky.

Sometimes I fall head over heels in love with movies. I guess the last time I felt like this was with Crouching Tiger, which I loved four times over.

My face actually ached from smiling. I couldn't believe how magnificent Ewan's voice was. It made my eyes fill and I just kept one hand pressed to my mouth because I was afraid I was going to start singing along. That voice. That smile. Shit. The other hand I kept pressed to my heart.

And I, I who have long despised Nicole Kidman with a deep and abiding hatred, I who have declared her a talentless amazon for years on end -- I was impressed by her. I was shocked, in fact, by how gorgeous she is. And how strong and deep her voice could be. Oh, it might have been synthesized and magnified and tinted with that echo, but I didn't care. It worked. It worked.

When Ewan sang out, "The hills are alive," at the beginning of the movie, I made this noise that was a strange combination of a yelp, a gasp, and a giggle, and I knew. I knew I was meant to be sitting in that theater in that moment, and that I would be sitting in it again soon, to see it again and again. I was overloaded with happiness. It was like seeing a Broadway show. Sometimes it was like seeing a Broadway show on acid.

It made me want to paint my house red and purple and orange and green. It made me want to fly to New York and see every musical on Broadway. It made me want to fall asleep and dream, dream about color and light and Ewan's voice. It made me want to fall in love with a boy who can sing like that.

It made me wish more movies would dare to combine clichˇ with innovation and go so far over the top that the audience is either left cheering or walking out in disgust before it even ends. I love that it divided us and made us feel the way we did about it so strongly.

I really loved it. Like, obsessively. I listen to "Your Song" and I just well up with joy and love of life and the world. Isn't that what art is supposed to do for you? I think so. I think that's the whole point. Some people might see this film as an obnoxious splash of tackiness. Some might find it nauseating and ridiculous. I can actually see how they might. And that's fine. Yay for them. But I loved it, and I stand by my love of it, and I know that anyone else who loves it is automatically, in my eyes, someone worth knowing. Somebody whose ideals might be similar to my own. Someone who has a little imagination. Whose imagination can transcend realism and see life in light and color and hear it in song.

Sometimes, as the sweltering heat of summer is waiting to strike, and a tropical storm is blowing into town, and a girl is at her wit's end with misbehaving dogs and nonstop weddings and a work session whose end is finally peeking into sight, sometimes only something completely outrageous has the outrageous strength to whirl her away to a place where the tiresome fades with the mundane and made-up words make sense and everything abstract and impossible suddenly turns eatable and drinkable and danceable and singable. Where it's possible to believe.

To see a face on the moon.


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