Nic & J-Lo.(Review)

The Australian director Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was clearly a misnomer. The work's reduction to the taste of the MTV generation was plainly Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet. About his Moulin Rouge, the buzz from Cannes was pretty bad; as it turns out, its Baz is worse than its buzz.

Luhrmann's forte-if it can be called that-is splash, swirl, and frenetic cutting, to leave the viewers breathless and unthinking. Since his audience tends to come equipped with the latter attribute, he can concentrate on gaudiness and breakneck speed. In this Moulin Rouge there is far more decor and frippery than plot and character, and the dialogue is a blend of the cribbed and the cliched. But the tempo is such that hardly a shot exceeds six or seven seconds-many shots, in fact, are virtually subliminal-and the crass display of opulence is a veritable nouveau-riche banquet. Whatever else it lacks, the film suffocates in sheer razzmatazz, or, more exactly, Bazmatazz.

You had best come to it supplied with Dramamine or some other anti- seasickness drug; it is easily the equivalent of a stormy Atlantic crossing, though the shipboard orchestras are far more chaste and melodious than a Luhrmann soundtrack. The only times this one's fury abates is when Nicole Kidman-as Satine, the "Sparkling Diamond" of the Moulin floor show-chirps in her own fragile voice, so dainty that even electronic enhancement sits on it like falsies on a flat chest. When the men vocalize-Ewan McGregor in more than mezza voce, and Jim Broadbent in spunky sprechstimme-I suspect that the two masculine names billed in the credits as "vocal doubles" deserve the applause.

The story is a brazen concoction from La Traviata (lovely courtesan dying of consumption sacrifices herself for her beloved's good by pretending to prefer a rich nobleman), La Boheme (hero surrounded by merry bohemian friends, heroine succumbing to obligatory consumption after loving reconciliation with him), the musical On Your Toes (while hero is on stage, killer stalks him with gun but must find proper moment to shoot him), and heaven knows where else.

Our hero, a young Englishman named Christian (McGregor), is trying to make it as a writer in turn-of-the-century Paree (a setup borrowed from George du Maurier's Trilby, and countless others). Never before in love, he falls fatally for Satine, the courtesan-dancer who herself has never before loved, but reciprocates, harboring as she does under her lust for gold a repressed heart of same. But roughening the course of true love are Harold Zidler (Jim Broadbent), the near-bankrupt owner of the Moulin, and the wealthy Duke of Worcester (Richard Roxburgh), who will finance the "spectacular spectacular" Christian is writing for Zidler and Satine in exchange for the lady's utter and undivided favors.

The banalities of the meager plot will not be rehearsed here; suffice it to say that Christian's pal Toulouse-Lautrec (whom his intimates here call Toulouse; Henri might confuse a Luhrmannite audience) is played wretchedly by John Leguizamo, who doesn't even manage to look as convincing as Jose Ferrer in John Huston's 1952 version. As Satine expires in the arms of the sobbing Christian, she exhorts him that he must go on, having so much to give to the world. Earlier, in her Camille mode, she said, "The difference between you and I [sic] is that you can leave anytime, but this is my home, the Moulin Rouge." By a cruel irony of the Grim Reaper, it is she who is leaving, but she assures Christian, "I'll always be with you." We see him throughout typing his musical, entitled Moulin Rouge, on his trusty vintage '99 Underwood. If Satine is truly watching from above, she may not, alas, see his ...