Moulin Rouge! turns 25: A pop opera for the MTV generation

Here, there, everywhere 

2001 was not a year of minimal emotions. Young audiences feasted on a diet of music videos, sensationalist news, celebrity gossip and an infant internet pushing information into overdrive. Subcultures collided and fused. Luhrmann harnessed that noise to capture the big emotions pulsing beneath it. His style was forged in a media environment that was loud, theatrical and steeped in variety culture.

It was also deeply Australian in nature: shaped by a nation both geographically remote and intensely outward-looking, constantly trying on new identities and stitching influences together into Frankenstein forms. That restless hybridity runs through Moulin Rouge! where everything is nested within something else. Sydney masquerades as Montmartre; a play exists within a memoir within a film.

This post-modern netherworld also reflects the scrappy spirit of Australian indie theatre, where Luhrmann honed his collaborative style in the ‘80s. He staged Crocodile Creek at the age of 23 with the help of 120 locals from regional Queensland. He put on operas and flirted with acting, then debuted Strictly Ballroom, first as a student play in Czechoslovakia, then at the Wharf Theatre, before it became an Australian cinema classic.

These roots in Australia, a land of fluidity and fragmentation, primed Luhrmann to understand modern audiences before much of cinema did. Before remixing and sampling became the dominant culture, he drew connections between traditions that seem to exist in separate stratospheres, proving the barriers between mediums were combustible.

Take his unique status as a hit-maker. Luhrmann's club track 'Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’ sums up how multiple mediums can collapse into a shared space of collective feeling. Released on the remix album Something for Everybody (1998), the track paired an imitation commencement speech incorrectly attributed to novelist Kurt Vonnegut with a remix of Rozalla’s dance anthem ‘Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good)’. The original text – actually written by columnist Mary Schmich for the Chicago Tribune – had already spread virally via email years before ‘viral’ entered the mainstream vocabulary. Luhrmann transformed the newspaper column that became an email chain that borrowed the authority of a famous novelist into a global club smash.

Like ‘Wear Sunscreen’, the soundtrack of Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet topped charts, going triple platinum in the US. The success was driven by Luhrmann's sharp curation, who retrofitted the Bard’s universal story of reckless young love to a generation that was multicultural, pop-obsessed and living in an age where music was portable and constant.

From Des'ree’s soulful crooning in ‘Kissing You’ to the Cardigans’ sugary ‘Lovefool’ to the blast of Mariachi-esque horns, the famous tale of resisting social division is carried by diverse sounds. Sonic hooks from R&B and garage rock were emanating from underground clubs, advertising, the opening credits of a favourite show and wired headphones.

An image from one of the concept books for Romeo + Juliet (1996), made by the Bazmark creative team of Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin. NFSA ID: 4HDQYA1J

While these anachronisms were divisive to critics, a look at the concept scrapbook reveals how considered the decisions were. A vision of an arrogant, crop-top wearing Tybalt at the beach, boasting his portable radio, unites the defiant spirit of the original text with the MTV generation’s aspirational aesthetics. The psychedelic visuals and mixtape sonic style was not a fantasia but a lived reality. Luhrmann's rejection of realism in favour of emotional saturation is – at its heart – a way of capturing truth.

The art of the mash-up

Winking at the past is nothing new. The art of the remix was mastered by Homer and the great oral traditions before him. But some film scholars consider Luhrmann’s mastery of interpolation unusually complex.

‘It is this dimension of Moulin Rouge! that makes it special, for it shows that Luhrmann is as eclectic in his methodology as he is in his musical tastes,’ writes Ann van de Merwe. ‘[The songs] are not recognizable simply as the romantic ballad or the up-tempo comedy number but as unique entities, songs belonging not only to another time and place but to another performer.’

With Moulin Rouge!, Luhrmann was alive to audience impulse and memory before they entered the theatre. Funk rock group Labelle’s provocative 1974 single ‘Lady Marmalade’ was remixed by the preeminent pop divas of the time – Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mýa, and P!nk – and released right before the film. A No. 1 hit, the song exerts its own influence before Christian even sets foot into the Moulin Rouge. And when it plays, over an explosion of can-can frocks, it infuses the courtesans with not only sensual power but also a blast of 2000s pop stardom.

Similarly, when Christian first sees Satine descend in a shower of glitter, Luhrmann understands that glamour is never created from scratch. It is assembled from centuries of images, sounds and theatrical media personalities. His creative work draws on a well of shared memory. Satine’s playful rendition of ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) does more than reference Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei Lee, another showgirl searching for financial security. Layered choreography, costuming and the ghost of Marilyn’s entire celebrity persona are all at work, creating a portrait of undeniable mystique.

‘We needed to make it clear with the costumes' signs and symbols that that’s who she was,’ said costume designer, production designer and associate producer Catherine Martin, in an interview with The Guardian. ‘We looked to Hollywood’s glamour heroines like Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo.’

Original sketch of one of Nicole Kidman's costumes from Moulin Rouge!. NFSA title: 1638177.

Like much of Luhrmann’s work, ‘Diamonds’ has multiple life cycles. In a burst of world music spectacle, ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ later collides with the Hindi-language hit ‘Chamma Chamma’, mirroring Bollywood’s emotional scale and visual excess during the film’s bombastic climax. And, in one of the most iconic sequences, the Police’s rock single ‘Roxanne’ is blended with Argentine composer Mariano Mores’ ‘Tanguera’ to become ‘El Tango de Roxanne’. This retelling occurs not only in music but in a memorable bout of tango. Sting’s lyrics about doomed love echo in the instrumentation, the passionate movement of bodies, and the film’s editing – a fever pitch of united anguish.

This mash-up wizardry is perhaps best captured by Kidman and McGregor’s vocal sparring in the ‘Elephant Love Medley’. Splicing together Top 40 hits from the Beatles and U2 to Phil Collins and Dolly Parton, it’s a soaring Greek pop-chorus of uncertainty and giddy attraction. Familiar lyrics – played in pubs and on car radios, at graduations and weddings – take on fresh life as an argument between two new lovers. Who needs more words when all you need is love?

Australian maximalism

Moulin Rouge’s sensory thrills and sing-along style were partly inspired by Luhrmann’s experiences with Bollywood films, where he was struck by the interactive relationship with Indian audiences. But a key part of the showmanship is those formative years on Aussie stages.

The ensemble cast and creative team were overwhelmingly Australian, and despite the vastly bigger budget and global scale, Moulin Rouge! is not all that far removed from Crocodile Creek. Both are driven by Luhrmann’s instinct for collaborative chaos, theatrical excess and emotionally heightened spectacle.The collaborative spirit of theatre lives on, with composer Craig Armstrong telling The Guardian: ‘Baz will ask anybody for their advice. Even the assistants making coffee.’

The story is anchored by underdogs, from the courtesans to Jim Broadbent’s flailing ringmaster to Christian’s musician friends, who often feel like a young band haunting their share house and their local bar. Fittingly, Christian is welcomed into the bohemian underworld by an apparition of Kylie Minogue.

Much like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, directed by Luhrmann’s mentor Jim Sharman, the whiz-bang spectacle is accompanied by a deliberate lack of Hollywood polish. Make-up is often garish and messily applied; the humour is irreverent. The characters stage stunning shows, but many scenes pull us backstage, lingering in moments of creative spats, improvisation and the scramble to bring disparate parts into a dazzling whole. Moulin Rouge! is a love letter to scrappy theatre kids and Australian identity itself.

‘There are these really strong, disparate bits, but they all come together as a whole,’ Luhrmann told Film Quarterly. ‘Our recognisable cinematic and theatrical language around the world is made of that because the country is made of that. In Australia, more than anywhere else in the world, we are able to say that strong disparate bits making up a whole is what we are all about.’

Excess and spectacle would soon become the dominant visual language of the 21st century. What sets Luhrmann apart is a deep archival knowledge, which reveals the human impulses that connect us across time. What do Shakespeare, Puccini and Kylie Minogue have in common? And what bridges one thousand years with the next?

At its heart, Moulin Rouge! brings together disparate parts with intention and soul, powered by enduring spirit of Bohemia, pop and everything that is spectacular, spectacular.

References

Ann van der Merwe, ‘Music, the Musical and Postmodernism in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!’, Music and the Moving Image, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2010.

Baz Luhrmann in conversation with Elsie M Walker, Conversations with Directors: An Anthology of Interviews from Literature/Film Quarterly, EM Walker and DT Johnson (eds), Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2008.