It was midway through the Moulin Rouge press conference at Cannes that I put down my pen in exasperation. None of the actors — Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, John Leguizamo — was offering much that was revelatory, and director Baz Luhrmann, point man for the production, seemed, well, sort of middlebrow dumb. I was squandering my afternoon on a movie I hadn’t warmed up to in the first place, with all that frantic hyperediting destroying the integrity of virtually every dance number. I kept thinking about Jean Renoir’s masterly Moulin Rouge–set French Cancan.

Aussie Luhrmann made his reputation with the back-to-back smashes Strictly Ballroom and William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. At Cannes, he’d graduated to Theories, faux intellectual ones, about how Moulin Rouge is an Orphic saga (bosh!) and how his three pictures qualify as (his term) “Red Curtain Dramas” that “take place in a heightened creative world, where the audience is kept aware it is watching a movie. It’s a contract, and when someone breaks out in song, ‘I love you, I love you,’ the audience is at ease.”

Bertolt Brecht Luhrmann isn’t. Anyway, nine-tenths of the journalists squeezed into the Cannes conference didn’t give a hoot about the Moulin Rouge filmmaker’s æsthetic philosophy. They were there to see whether Nicole Kidman would slip up and say something about her divorce from Tom Cruise. And what of the rumors that she was involved with co-star McGregor and (even lower) that her miscarried child had been McGregor’s?

A Canadian film critic tried a slippery trick: “Miss Kidman, I’m not going to ask you about your personal life [at which point he was hissed by the hypocritical gathering], but you must feel very passionate about this film to want to come out in public and get behind it.” Kidman: “Obviously it’s my choice not to have questions about my personal life. Thank you for not asking.” Yes, she did feel a need to support Moulin Rouge because of the inherent difficulties with promoting it: “The public isn’t saying, ‘This is what we want to see, a musical,’ and you can’t describe Moulin Rouge in the necessary two sentences.” And she feels passionate about her director, a fellow Aussie and long-time pal: “He’s been an actor and he loves actors. You feel an enormous sense of devotion. You feel safe and you say, ‘I’m willing to take time with this guy.’ Baz is my angel.”

Baz returned the compliment: “A long time ago, Nicole and I did this shoot together for Vogue. We met for lunch, and she was funny, gangly, raucous.” Luhrmann offered that his greatest pleasure is to be part of the process by which an actor stretches, discovering sides to a talent that has never been revealed. Contemplating Kidman: “She has this beautiful iconic image. But for Moulin Rouge, why not let the craziness come out?” Hello, Baz! Kidman’s craziness has already come out — and in much more inspired fashion — with her loopy rendition of murderer Pam Smart in To Die For.

And one Cannes question tossed to co-star John Leguizamo: how did he get cast as the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec? “There was a two-hour audition on my knees. That’s how I usually get my parts.”

HAVE YOU FELT QUEASY watching the mainstream media rush to defend former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey, forgiving his accepting a Silver Medal while keeping silent for decades about his massacre of Vietnam civilians? There were other ways for disillusioned Vietnam vets to go, as is made clear in the potent documentary An Unfinished Sympathy, by local filmmakers Bestor Cram and Mike Majoros, which will be screening at the MFA this month (June 2, 3, 16, 23, and 30). It’s 1971, and we see Vietnam Veterans Against the War pulling their bronze medals off their chests and slinging them angrily over a fence onto the White House lawn. We see these same vets talking to reporters about the killing of innocents that they’ve committed. One vet dares call himself “a war criminal.” As these vets march through Lexington and Concord to bring the boys home, where is Bob Kerrey?

There are, however, scenes of soldier John Kerry delivering ministerial speeches pleading for the Vietnam War to end. In contrast to your haggard, scruffy, bitter, dope-smoking GI, Kerry is a poster boy, clean and Kennedy-coiffed, and his anti-war words are tempered and moderate. You’d hope our junior senator would be proud of what he said in 1971. So far he’s distanced himself from An Unfinished Symphony, as he contemplates a 2004 run for the presidency of our right-tilting land.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com.

Issue Date: May 31- June 7, 2001