If we assume he knows what he’s doing, then Baz Luhrmann’s goal seems to be the end of cinema as we know it: i.e., a coherent art form that provides pleasure and meaning. How else explain Moulin Rouge, a film that takes beautiful actors, sets, costumes, and production numbers, fuses (or diffuses) a century and a half of pop culture from Verdi to MTV, photographs it all like a freak show, and chops it into confetti? This is the Memento of movie musicals, stroboscopically edited into three-second segments without apparent logic, cohesion, or continuity and designed to cater to — or induce — short-term memory disorder.

Okay, so it’s also an artifice about artifice, as is evident from the first shot of a proscenium and a curtain symphonically rising over the studio logo (with this film, for better or worse, that should be 21st Century Fox). Moulin Rouge opens to the rooftops of Paris as they might have been imagined by Tim Burton, with buildings shaped like elephants and a mustachio’d moon, where unfolds the tale of Christian (Ewan McGregor), a British wanna-be writer in town to take in “1899 — the summer of love” and join in the “revolution” of “truth, beauty, freedom, and love.”

By slapstick contrivance (a narcoleptic Argentinian falls through his roof, ho ho!), Christian meets “Toulouse” (John Leguizamo as Lautrec popping into the frame like the cockroach in the Orkin pesticide commercial) and his bohemian buddies, who hope to put on a show called Spectacular Spectacular at the cabaret Moulin Rouge. They need a new writer, and Christian, who knows the lyrics to the songs from The Sound of Music (Rouge flaunts its anachronism, to no avail), is their man.

He gets more than he bargained for, falling in love with Satine (Nicole Kidman), the star of the show, a luminous courtesan who enters on a swing singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” But the Duke (Richard Roxburgh), the show’s backer, expects Satine to be part of the deal, and he demands exclusive rights to her from Zidler (Jim Broadbent), the club’s proprietor. That’s just the beginning of Satine’s problems — she coughs blood into a handkerchief (and Nicole thought this Tom Cruise thing was a drag).

How operatic — as in La traviata, La bohčme, and a little bit of Cabaret. Then there’s the Brecht element that Luhrmann keeps claiming. By calling attention to the artifice, so goes the alienation-effect theory, the film makes the audience question the illusion and the realities it seeks to conceal, thus invoking a state of objective awareness. This, however, is no Threepenny Opera. There is no reality behind the illusion, no social or ideological consciousness. Hammered home at 24 frames a second, the illusion is all, and the only state it invokes is stupefaction.

Okay, so how about a polysemous intertextuality evoking the postmodern condition? The contemporary songs (“Children of the Revolution,” “Roxanne,” “Nature Boy” as an annoying leitmotif), the relentless pop references, the Cuisinart style? Thanks, but I’ll take Top Hat any day. They not only had faces then, they had bodies, too. When Fred and Ginger or Gene and Cyd danced, they were shown fully framed in one continuous shot (or as few shots as possible), and we could see them not just dancing but reveling in the elegant, otherworldly physical act.

Even Luhrmann’s MTV editing wouldn’t be a bad thing if there were a point to it — but it’s an exercise in pointlessness. Instead of colliding to create something new, as Eisenstein might suggest, the shots bounce around like pinballs or self-destruct like antimatter. Perhaps Luhrmann is indulging a perverse desire to deny audience satisfaction. More likely, he’s trying to conceal the film’s essential banality and ineptitude. We’ll never know from Moulin Rouge, for example, whether Kidman or McGregor can dance, though to judge from their singing, it’s unlikely.

What makes the film most frustrating is that there are times when what’s going on seems worth slowing down — say, Jim Broadbent’s hilarious version of “Like a Virgin.” And then there’s the morbid fascination of sheer awfulness. It’s not enough, however, to redeem this death by a thousand cuts.

Issue Date: May 31- June 7, 2001