Christian, a young wannabe Bohemian poet living in 1899 Paris, defies his father by joining the colorfully diverse clique inhabiting the dark, fantastical underworld of Paris' now legendary Moulin Rouge. In this seedy but glamorous haven of sex, drugs and newly-discovered electricity, the poet-innocent finds himself plunged into a passionate but ultimately tragic love affair with Satine, the club's highest paid star and the city's most famous courtesan. Their romance is played out against the infamous club - a meeting place of high life and low, where slumming aristocrats and the fashionably rich mingled with workers, artists, Bohemians, actresses and courtesans.

Watching Baz Luhrmann's award-winning Moulin Rouge is a lot like falling in love. It is total immersion cinema and while you're experiencing it ("watching" is too passive a word) you can't imagine that cinema could be for anything else. In the harsh, objective post-viewing daylight Lurhmann's gaudy spectacular might seem like a triumph of glossy style over any genuine substance, but as the film unfolds Lurhmann subjects his audience to a such a barrage of overtly stylised music, dance, colour, design and human passion that the senses are overwhelmed and critical faculties put on hold for the duration. The story is paper-thin, but that's hardly the point. Nicole Kidman's courtesan Satine falls for poor poet Ewan McGregor while pledged to a psychotic English Duke. The show goes on, of course, and we know it will end in tragedy--because that's the sort of story this is, and the only thing that makes it bearable is the knowledge that it's all just brilliant artifice. The third of Luhrman's "Red Curtain" trilogy (after Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet), Moulin Rouge reinvents musical cinema, acknowledging its debt to past masters like Vincente Minnelli (Gigi) and Michael Powell (The Red Shoes), but taking in the best of rock video along the way. The incessant MTV-style editing might seem like a distraction, but in the end a film insane enough to include Jim Broadbent's cover of "Like a Virgin" defines its own genre rules.

Like almost every American college boy who ever took a cut-rate flight to Paris, I went to the Moulin Rouge on my first night in town. I had a cheap standing-room ticket way in the back, and over the heads of the crowd, through a haze of smoke, I could vaguely see the dancing girls. The tragedy of the Moulin Rouge is that by the time you can afford a better seat, you've outgrown the show. "Moulin Rouge" the movie is more like the Moulin Rouge of my adolescent fantasies than the real Moulin Rouge ever could be. It isn't about tired, decadent people, but about glorious romantics, who believe in the glitz and the tinsel--who see the nightclub not as a shabby tourist trap but as a stage for their dreams. Even its villain is a love-struck duke who gnashes his way into the fantasy, content to play a starring role however venal. The film is constructed like the fevered snapshots created by your imagination before an anticipated erotic encounter. It doesn't depend on dialogue or situation but on the way you imagine a fantasy object first from one angle and then another. Satine, the heroine, is seen not so much in dramatic situations as in poses--in postcards for the yearning mind. The movie is about how we imagine its world. It is perfectly appropriate that it was filmed on sound stages in Australia; Paris has always existed best in the minds of its admirers. The film stars Nicole Kidman as Satine, a star dancer who has a deadly secret; she is dying of tuberculosis. This is not a secret from the audience, which learns it early on, but from Christian (Ewan McGregor), the would-be writer who loves her. Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo), the dwarf artist, lives above Christian, and one day comes crashing through the ceiling of their flimsy tenement, sparking a friendship and collaboration: They will write a show to spotlight Satine's brilliance, as well as "truth, beauty, freedom and love." (I was reminded of Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor's motto in "Singin' in the Rain": "Dignity. Always dignity.") The show must be financed; enter the venal Duke of Worcester (Richard Roxburgh), who wants to pay for the show and for Satine's favors. The ringmaster is Zidler (Jim Broadbent), impresario of the Moulin Rouge. Each of these characters is seen in terms of their own fantasies about themselves. Toulouse-Lautrec, for example, is flamboyant and romantic; Christian is lonely and lovelorn; Satine has a good heart and only seems to be a bad girl; Zidler pretends to be all business but is a softy, and the Duke can be so easily duped because being duped is the essence of his role in life. Those who think they can buy affection are suckers; a wise man is content to rent it. The movie was directed by Baz Luhrmann, an Australian with a background in opera, whose two previous films were also experiments in exuberant excess. "Strictly Ballroom" made a ballroom competition into a flamboyant theatrical exercise, and his "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet" updated the play into a contempo teenage rumble. He constructs "Moulin Rouge" with the melodrama of a 19th century opera, the Technicolor brashness of a 1950s Hollywood musical and the quick-cutting frenzy of a music video. Nothing is really "period" about the movie--it's like a costume revue taking place right now, with hit songs from the 1970s and 1980s (you will get the idea if I mention that Jim Broadbent sings "Like a Virgin"). I am often impatient with directors who use so many cuts their films seem to have been fed through electric fans. For Luhrmann and this material, it is the right approach. He uses so many different setups and camera angles that some of the songs seem to be cut not on every word of the lyrics, but on every syllable. There's no breathing room. The whole movie is on the same manic pitch as O'Connor's "Make 'em Laugh" number in "Singin' in the Rain." Everything is screwed to a breakneck pitch, as if the characters have died and their lives are flashing before our eyes. This means the actors do not create their characters but embody them. Who is Satine? A leggy redhead who can look like a million dollars in a nightclub costume, and then melt into a guy's arms. Who is Christian? A man who embodies longing with his eyes and sighs--whose very essence, whose entire being, is composed of need for Satine. With the Duke, one is reminded of silent films in which the titles said "The Duke," and then he sneered at you. The movie is all color and music, sound and motion, kinetic energy, broad strokes, operatic excess. While it might be most convenient to see it from the beginning, it hardly makes any difference; walk in at any moment and you'll quickly know who is good and bad, who is in love and why--and then all the rest is song, dance, spectacular production numbers, protestations of love, exhalations of regret, vows of revenge and grand destructive gestures. It's like being trapped on an elevator with the circus. --ROGER EBERT

Paris is returning to our screens in a big way. Soon, we will see the stardust-besprinkled retro-historical Paris of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's romantic comedy Amelie - every McDonald's photoshopped out of the picture. Also, Jean-Luc Godard will soon be making a much-heralded return to Paris in his new movie, Éloge de L'amour: sited in the exuberant but some how high-serious, black-and-white Paris of his early career. But in the meantime, we have the wildly over-the-top fantasy Paris of Baz Luhrmann's "musical", Moulin Rouge. It is a gorgeously, intricately conceived city, but stately and monolithic, like a chandelier or a gigantic and very expensive Fabergé egg. This is to be the setting for the story of Satine, played by the statuesque Nicole Kidman in her new post-Tom existence; she is a courtesan-cum-chanteuse at the Moulin Rouge, who falls in love with Christian, a penniless would-be writer played by Ewan McGregor, and winds up playing Sally Bowles to his Christopher Isherwood. It is a computer generated-Paris which does not need to be taken seriously, either in its lineaments or its historical reality. Like everything else in this madly over- excitable film - like the design, the plot, the performances and especially the music - it is a great big joke, tipping us a cheeky wink. From the first frame of this film, and all the way through until it slows right down for a ponderous, Andrew Lloyd Webber-style tragic ending, Moulin Rouge screams along at breakneck pace. With his cartoon gestures and his trademark crash zooms into people's faces, Luhrmann cannot - or will not - calm down. We are never allowed to draw breath. It is as if Baz has simply gone to Starbucks, purchased a 10-gallon drum of pure espresso for each member of the cast and crew, imbibed about 20 gallons himself, and then shouted "Action!" There are loads of pastiche musical numbers, when the principals burst into anachronistic song: The Sound of Music, Diamond Dogs, Roxanne and Song For Guy. But in each and every case, Luhrmann seems to be inviting a little whoop of congratulatory applause - like that which greets Stars In Their Eyes contestants when they start singing in character - simply to laud his sheer cleverness in having 19th-century Parisians sing 1970s pop songs. As a distancing technique it soon loses its novelty and it is in any case ineffective, because this feverishly stylised movie is all distancing anyway. There is never a moment when we are not being frantically jolted and dislodged by some tic or quirk. We are bombarded with gimmicks like this. (Brian Helgeland's use of pop songs in Ye Olde Medieval Europe in his A Knight's Tale, is more outrageous in one sense, but he uses them more sparingly, and in any case gives his narrative more time to build up momentum, and credibility, between numbers.) In such a maelstrom of excess, the actors themselves have to anchor the movie as best they can, and Luhrmann is fortunate to have the excellent Jim Broadbent as Zidler, the puffy, paunchy impresario who bullies Satine into giving up her love for Christian so that she can sleep with the libidinous Duke of Worcester, who has promised to put money into the club. Nicole Kidman herself cuts an intriguing and patrician figure, as tall and delicate as a baby giraffe, but only hints at the interesting performance that she might have been able to give in a movie with real people set in a real Moulin Rouge. As for Ewan McGregor, he is the happiest he has been in a long time, after a run of dodgy roles which had threatened to obliterate our memory of him in Trainspotting or Shallow Grave. His open, likeable face actually responds rather well to Luhrmann's hyperactive, beady-eyed direction, and this is an engaging and attractive performance. Oddly, and a little obtusely, there is not much about the can-can in this movie: a shame, as a movie with a more intelligent interest in the myth and history of the place might have had some fun with the can-can's erotics of concealment and disclosure. And there isn't much for Toulouse-Lautrec to do: as played by John Leguizamo, he is a cartoon figure, hardly more real than Eric Morecambe's impression of Jose Ferrer: kneeling on his shoes to get the right height. This movie, though blessed with some stunning architectural design, never pays its audience the compliment of giving them the time and space to look around. We are driven back by the great undifferentiated roar of colour and light and noise. It is as if a jeroboam of champagne has been shaken up far too much and then uncorked in our faces. That isn't a very refreshing or tasty experience.

Thirty years ago, the New Australian Cinema captured the attention of the world with heroic stories set in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, films like Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, The Getting of Wisdom, Burke and Wills. They were tales of the formation of a national identity, of the recent European settlers' transactions with their strange new world and its frighteningly mystical inhabitants. When this vein was exhausted, local filmmakers left home or turned to the problematic present of people living lives of noisy desperation in the sprawling suburbs of the big coastal cities, home of most Australians. As television serials like Neighbours, these cosy unheroic stories achieved worldwide popularity, but relatively few theatrical films of this sort have found success elsewhere, except for a small handful that brought camp artifice to this cosy material. One thinks especially of Muriel's Wedding, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and what Baz Luhrmann calls his 'red curtain trilogy' - Strictly Ballroom, Romeo and Juliet and now Moulin Rouge. All three of Luhrmann's pictures are highly accomplished and calculatedly theatrical. They're loving assemblages of conventions and clichés from musicals of the past, produced with a sort of aggressive brio that makes the audience feel as if they're being targeted by a squadron of kamikaze bombers loaded with sugary marshmallow. Moulin Rouge is set in the Paris of 1899 in and around the eponymous nightclub, but it's shot entirely on Australian sound stages. A lisping figure we later come to recognise as Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo) sings the lugubrious 1940s song 'Nature Boy' to introduce the hero, Christian (Ewan McGregor), a naïve English poet and composer. Within minutes, Christian has met Lautrec, the composer Erik Satie (Matthew Whittet) and a cataleptic figure called 'the Unconscious Argentinian', and been co-opted into working on their musical, Spectacular, Spectacular . He immediately wins their admiration by composing in a matter of seconds 'The Sound of Music'. They aim to persuade Zidler (Jim Broadbent), the explosively rubicund owner of the Moulin Rouge, to mount the show with the beautiful courtesan Satine (Nicole Kidman) in the lead, and with him they conspire to get the lascivious Duke of Worcester (Richard Roxburgh), dangling Satine before him as bait. But the moment Satine appears, circling the dance floor of Moulin Rouge on a swing singing 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend', Christian is hopelessly smitten, and Spectacular, Spectacular becomes a fabulous Indian musical in a Bollywood style that in coded form tells of his love for Satine and his rivalry with the duke. By this point, or earlier, the audience will have taken sides, either being swept up by the anachronistic exuberance of the proceedings or grumbling that it's all too fast and Toulouse. Certainly it isn't trying to compete for a good taste prize with Gene Kelly's ballet from An American in Paris, John Huston's biopic of Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge (with its unforgettable opening 20 minutes), or French Cancan, Jean Renoir's realistic account of the creation of the Moulin Rouge. It is, however, asking to be taken seriously as romance, and a final title claims that 'this story is about truth, beauty, freedom and, above all, love'. Earlier, the impresario Zidler has informed us that: 'The show must go on. We're creatures of the underworld. We can't afford to love.' And at that point he would no doubt have started singing 'There's No Business Like Showbusiness' had the estate of Irving Berlin been prepared to sell Luhrmann the rights. Luhrmann, whose professional roots are in lyric theatre, claims that Moulin Rouge is a reworking of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, but the connection is tenuous. There's none of the debunking of mythology we get in Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, or the necrophilic romanticism of Cocteau's Orphée . In fact, it's much closer to La Traviata, with Satine discreetly coughing blood like Camille and Christian wanly wilting like Armand. The film strikes me though as having different origins. It's been called 'postmodernist' in the way it compacts numerous contrasting styles and disparate strands, in the manner of a garbage machine crushing everything it receives into a neat package. To me, Moulin Rouge brings back memories of the only sort of theatre I saw before my mid-teens - Christmas pantomimes, with their traditional tales that can accommodate the comics and glamourpusses of the day making topical jokes and singing the current hits. Those raised on pantos and Hope-Crosby road movies didn't need Brecht to tell them they weren't seeing reality on the stage, and they had become postmodernists before they even encountered modernism. So this tour de farce of trivia and Traviata, of tragic love and deliberate banality, is nothing new and Nicole Kidman has the figure, the strident manner and the sense of fun of an ideal Principal Boy. --Philip French

"Etonne-moi"-astonish me-ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev famously encouraged poet Jean Cocteau, and "Moulin Rouge" follows his advice. Most of the time. A fever dream of musical spectacle, its dizzying visual and melodic panache is operatic by intention and excessive by design. This is a flabbergasting piece of work, nakedly out there, willing to risk looking foolish because it is so in love with the head-turning possibilities of the film medium. And, inevitably, foolish is what it sometimes looks. Although it showcases excellent work from co-stars Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor as singing star-crossed lovers in turn-of-the-century Paris, "Moulin Rouge" is a film that can't escape the defects of its virtues. Over the top in all things, it's unwilling to differentiate between the delights of being cinematically outrageous and the drawbacks of having a plot that's as simplistic dramatically as the film is complex visually, of characterization that verges on cartoonish, especially in the minor roles, and of a weakness for the broadest, most exaggerated farce. In fact, far from trying to escape these things, "Moulin Rouge" seems to consider them virtues. Director Baz Luhrmann, a gifted impresario in his own right, probably views his film's predictability as mythic and its clichéd characters as archetypes. "We never heard from Baz to turn it down," one of the actors reported. "It was always, 'More! More!' " The director even sent a note to his cast reading, "I dare you to make me say you've gone too far." It's a tribute to the powerful vision and blasting energy of Luhrmann and his creative team, especially production and co-costume designer Catherine Martin, that, more than simply being inclined to give this film the benefit of the doubt, we're almost compelled to put up with the bad for the sake of the good. "Moulin Rouge" does its best to be overpowering, to force us to embrace (as happened in his previous "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet") even those excesses that seem questionable at first. What's good about this film is so exciting, it seems a shame to point out what isn't. In "Moulin Rouge," Luhrmann doesn't have Shakespeare to provide poetry and ballast; he and co-screenwriter Craig Pearce have only themselves to fall back on. The blatantly melodramatic way the story and many of the performances are conceived is distancing, pulling us out of any sense of involvement. It stands in the way of one of the things Luhrmann and company most want to accomplish, which is to be emotionally potent as well as visually extravagant. It's indicative of the fine work that Kidman and McGregor do, of the enthusiasm, abandon and skill they bring to their roles, that their characters engage us as much as they do. McGregor's Christian, the idealistic young writer on the loose in 1899 Montmartre, a.k.a. "the summer of love," is almost preternaturally naive and boyish. And Kidman, looking (in Martin and Angus Strathie's costumes) simultaneously glamorous, decadent and fragile, personifies with equal strength the part of Satine, "the most beautiful courtesan in all the world . . . paid to make men believe what they want to believe." More than act, they have to sing, for one of the notions behind "Moulin Rouge" is that when people's emotions get heightened, they have no choice but to burst into torrents of song. As to the lyrics, they're plundered, mixed and matched from what seems like the entire history of modern popular song, tapping so many celebrated tunes that it took 2½ years to license them all. Sting's "Roxanne" becomes a tango, and Kidman's Satine is introduced singing a medley that mixes the show tune "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" with Madonna's signature "Material Girl." Yes, it's chaotic, but these characters are better off singing than dealing with "Moulin Rouge's" shopworn scripted material. McGregor's Christian, who believes in truth, beauty, freedom and love above all else, is introduced with the oddly haunting Nat King Cole standard "Nature Boy" and a lyric that could stand as "Moulin Rouge's" theme:The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. This number is immediately followed by a taste of what will be the film's most off-putting aspect, the fake-slapstick Keystone Kops antics of Christian's avant-garde neighbors, led by the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo). This kind of willfully over-the-top characterization, the idea that overacting is an end in itself, is "Moulin Rouge" at its most irritating and purposeless. Convinced that Christian is a poet after he breaks into the lyrics from "The Sound of Music," Toulouse-Lautrec decides he is just the person to write the painter's new play, "Spectacular Spectacular." To that end, Christian gets taken to Moulin Rouge, the club of the moment, where the Mephistophelean Harold Zidler (Jim Broadbent) runs the house and Satine, "Spectacular Spectacular's" potential star, entertains gorgeously. Visualized by Martin, set decorator Brigitte Broch and supervising art director Ian Gracie as a kind of ultimate high- energy rave, this night is "Moulin Rouge" at its most overwhelming. Donald McAlpine's rich cinematography and Jill Bilcock's rapid, music-videoish editing, plus a whole lot of raffish cancan dancing, enable you to forget your troubles and pretend the film doesn't have any either. "Moulin Rouge's" most memorable musical number takes place on that night as well. It's the "Elephant Love Medley," named after the elephantine structure where Satine's boudoir is housed, and it samples lyrics including the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love," U2's "In the Name of Love," Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You," Elton John and Bernie Taupin's "Your Song" and, hard as it is to believe, more. Compared to words like those, it's no surprise that the plot that follows, involving a rapacious moneybags duke (Richard Roxburgh) willing to finance the show if Satine comes with the package, seems especially pedestrian. She in turn seems to have developed one of those persistent coughs that was apparently an occupational hazard for courtesans in the City of Light. Finally, and probably appropriately, seeing "Moulin Rouge" is like being thrust into the middle of a loud and frantic party whether you want to be there or not. You can go with it or resist it, be exhilarated or worn out. But forgetting the experience is not one of your options.--KENNETH TURAN

Won: AFI Composer of the Year; AFI Editor of the Year
Nominated: AFI Movie of the Year

Won: Outstanding Song in a Motion Picture Soundtrack
Nominated: Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture - John Leguizamo

Won: Best Art Direction-Set Decoration; Best Costume Design
Nominated: Best Actress in a Leading Role - Nicole Kidman; Best Cinematography; Best Editing; Best Makeup; Best Picture; Best Sound

Nominated: Best Costume; Best DVD Special Edition Release

Won: Best Edited Feature Film - Comedy or Musical

Nominated: Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography in Theatrical Releases

Won: Best Cinematography; Best Costume Design; Best Editing; Best Production Design; Best Sound
Nominated: Best Actor in a Leading Role - Ewan McGregor; Best Actor in a Supporting Role - Richard Roxburgh; Best Actress in a Leading Role - Nicole Kidman; Best Direction; Best Film

Won: Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music; Best Sound; Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role - Jim Broadbent
Nominated: Best Achievement in Special Visual Effects; Best Cinematography; Best Costume Design; Best Editing; Best Film; Best Make Up/Hair; Best Production Design; Best Screenplay - Original; David Lean Award for Direction

Won: Best Director (Tied with Ron Howard for Beautiful Mind, A (2001).)
Nominated: Best Picture

Nominated: Golden Palm

Won: Best Actress - Nicole Kidman; Best British Actor - Ewan McGregor; Best Director
Nominated: Best Film

Won: Five Continents Award - Baz Luhrmann; Outstanding European Achievement in World Cinema - Ewan McGregor

Won: Best Cinematography; Best Director

Won: Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy); Best Original Score - Motion Picture; Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy) - Nicole Kidman
Nominated: Best Director - Motion Picture; Best Original Song - Motion Picture; Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy) - Ewan McGregor

Won: Best Art Direction; Best Costume Design; Best Director; Best Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical; Best Original Score; Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical - Ewan McGregor; Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role, Comedy or Musical - Jim Broadbent; Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical - Nicole Kidman
Nominated: Best Cinematography; Best Film Editing; Best Original Song; Best Screenplay, Original; Best Sound; Best Visual Effects

Won:Movie of the Year

Won:Actress of the Year - Nicole Kidman (also for The Others(2001).); British Actor of the Year - Ewan McGregor; Film of the Year

Won: Best Production Design; Best Supporting Actor - Jim Broadbent (Also for Iris (2001).)

Won: Best Female Performance - Nicole Kidman; Best Musical Sequence - Nicole Kidman & Ewan McGregor
Nominated:Best Kiss - Nicole Kidman & Ewan McGregor