The hurried pacing also bodes well for the editing style because both are, well, hurried. Moulin Rouge! is an overblown tribute to love and infatuation - and in a sense is a tone poem for both. Those viewers of the more left-brained sort that experience love in a more pragmatic form very most likely don't relate to that - but for those viewers who taste love as a flash of color and beauty will find it easy to fall into the film's spell. The film's two leads fall into love almost instantly (after Ewan McGregor's Christian belts out a wonderful adaptation of Elton John's "Your Song", to be precise) - but no bother, love isn't meant to be practical or realistic for some people, anyways.

The spectacle doesn't lie simply within the film's visuals. If anything else seems to get under people's skin about the film, it's that much of the film's cast - including the two leads - aren't professional singers. But seeing two stars of the likes of Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman attempting (and succeeding, as far as my ears are concerned) to belt it out on the big screen add to the film's spectacle, not detracts from it. It's simply the glory of seeing Kidman and McGregor doing something most haven't seen them do before.

What I haven't seen Luhrmann do before is move a film this dramatically well. His previous film, the decent-enough William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet has obvious elements of drama - but Moulin Rouge! is the superior tragedy. That's not to imply it's moving or in any way poignant - especially considering how overblown and intentionally cliche it all is (not to mention that the fact that the heroine dies is told to us in one of the very first lines in the film) - but Luhrmann manages to pull a spectacle of a drama with his technique.

No film of the new century has portrayed such a love for the cinema, especially the films of the old American tradition and the silent era (with the possible - and very different - exception of E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire). It's one of those films that manages to be just as new and exciting to me every time I view it. It's a tribute to the film as a visual (and audio) medium - and, as the tagline says: truth, beauty, freedom and above all, love.

This review and all others by John Lars Ericson since September, 2003, can be found at Filmateur