March
2002.jpg)
Now
Playing At The Adelphia-Astoria: Molulin Rouge
By Issy Chaplin
It
was just a coincidence that Moulin Rouge, starring Nicole Kidman,
happened to be playing at the Adelphia-Astoria on the day this year's
Academy Award nominations were announced. The colorful, quirky film
was featured at the urging of theater owner Adam Jeffers' daughter
Miranda, now a vice president at Merrill Lynch but once an aspiring
actress who played supporting roles in some of Passage Theatre's
early productions. Left to his own devices, Jeffers says, he might
not have presented Moulin Rouge. "It's not my cup of tea,"
he admits, "but it's certainly an interesting experiment."
Indeed,
Jeffers is correct in referring to Moulin Rouge as an experiment.
Directed by Baz Luhrman, best known for his audacious opera productions
in Europe and Australia, as well as the 1996 version of Romeo and
Juliet starring Leonardo DiCaprio, the film is an unusual - some
have said brilliant - telling of a 1900 story using songs by the
Beatles and Elton John, as well as Broadway standards. The film
is set in the French cabaret known as the Moulin Rouge, where headliner
is the courtesan Satine (Kidman), a vibrant, cold-as-china woman
who enthralls a young writer, Christian (Ewan McGregor), who has
come to the city to make a name for himself, but through sheer chance
finds himself in the midst of an effort to produce a musicale that
will transform the Moulin Rouge from a sex palace into a grand,
legitimate theater.
Throughout
the film, characters suddenly break into song - and familiar song,
at that - often startling the audience. You can't help but wonder
how these characters can know "All You Need Is Love" or
"Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend," which Kidman manages
to sing with the sultriness of Monroe and the enthusiasm of Madonna.
With the camera cutting back and forth at an alarming pace, viewers
must pay close attention to follow this unfolding of this frenzied,
schizophrenic world. But, as Adam Jeffers points out, "after
20 minutes, the strangest thing happens: It all starts to make some
sort of sense. You stop thinking about time and place and instead
think about the story and its characters."
"It's
bold," opines his daughter Miranda. "And it's especially
entertaining to anyone who has ever worked in or loved the theater."
Post-modern
- retro-modern, even - Moulin Rouge is nothing if not a crazy, mixed-up
mishmash of an experiment. It captures the zany, colorful madness
of creativity and dreams, and some viewers will undoubtedly be reminded
of Fellini's surreal circus imagery. The garish colors and impossible
architecture that define the world of Moulin Rouge is matched only
by the absurd, yet heartfelt characters who finally win over the
audience. When Christian recites Elton John's "Your Song"
upon his first private audience with Satine (in her brightly colored,
elephant-shaped boudoir), there's an odd rightness to the moment.
It's at once funny, odd and a brilliant use of lyric. The movie
may be uneven, it may be archly ridiculous at times, but underneath
it all is a refreshing rightness to its use of music and lyrics.
Kidman and McGregor are particularly effective in their understated
performances, all the more so given the brash world in which Luhrman
has placed them. Their singing voices, and it is the actors who
are singing for the most part, are charming, untrained yet tuneful,
which is one reason this odd vision of a movie succeeds. In the
nakedness of these sweet but untrained voices is an unmistakable
humanity.
Perhaps
the best summing up of Moulin Rouge comes from Adam Jeffers: "It
made me dizzy," he said. "But I can't get it out of my
mind."
Issy Chaplin
is a Trenton native, now working at the Division of Taxation
