I absolutely hate this film. I saw it with some girlfriends at the cinema and seemed to be the lone naysayer. I don’t hang out with those women anymore. Baz Luhrmann’s fin de siecle “spectacular” is like Cirque De Soleil for pre-teens who’ve never seen films-or the circus- before. It’s an absolute disaster.Worse yet, it thinks it’s a kitsch celebration of musicals. It’s really not.
Where do we start? The constantly swirling ADHD whip pans and zooms -cum-MTV visuals? Or perhaps it’s with the woefully miscast Nicole Kidman, pretty awful at the best of times, but surpassing herself here with her perma-pout, wiggle and thin voice. Kidman plays Satine, a dying courtesan and performer at the Moulin Rouge cabaret (we know this from the early foreshadowing scene when she coughs blood into a handkerchief, the idiot equivalent of Chekhov’s gun).
Ewan McGregor, as Christian , a struggling poet, like it matters, falls desperately in love with her, and their duets together are truly, jaw- dropping. The transition in the Elephant Love medley where he suddenly bellows, “WE COULD BE HEROES!” in a broad Scottish accent made most of the cinema snigger. Oh, Renton, why hast thou forsaken us, ye pure radge? Don’t get me started on Kidman’s breathy, pitchy take on ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend ‘, where she struts unco-ordinatedly around in a corset, squealing. She’s like Popeye’s Olive Oyl given a bad boudoir makeover. There’s a pitiful plotline: doomed lovers who can never be together (haven’t we done this Romeo…I mean, rodeo, before, Baz?) only it’s Paris, but it’s not, because it’s Baz Luhrmann’s exclamation mark of a film, and his high kicking, high camp version of Paris for the tres ironique millennium audience.
It’s not much of anything, really, just window dressing and people flouncing knowingly around in nice costumes. He’s no Vincent Minelli, Luhrmann, certainly not a Bob Fosse either. There’s no satire. It’s empty, and the leads have zero chemistry, so it’s hard to give a flying turtle fuck about any of it. The endless medleys haunt my reverie , like pain after surgery. They seriously suck. I spent most of the film smiling grimly like an indulgent mother at a nativity waiting for my little one, the shepherd, to come on. And if you think that was a comparison too far, trust me. Nothing much of any note happens here. At all. For over two hours. It’s- just look at the shiny things. It’s Melania at the White House, giving a guided tour as war rages elsewhere. Look, so shiny. Wilde said “You can’t polish a turd”. I beg to differ. Baz Luhrmann gave it a bloody good try.
At least La La Land took Damien Chazelle’s love of the form and deconstructed all of its tired tropes, from contrived meet-cute to tacked -on happy ending. He pulled back the curtain to expose the hollowness within. This is, to quote the Bard himself, “a tale told by an idiot”. Tongue- in -cheek is fine when there’s a storyline there aiming to pastiche. This is soulless, vapid and boring, all wrapped up in a big red bow, the gift we never asked for. You know it’s bad when Nirvana is played, Broadway cabaret style, with Jim Broadbent winking at the camera in a waistcoat. Start as you mean to go on. Ughhh. Did I mention that I hate this film?
Hit The North 