Moulin Rouge (2001)

MOULIN ROUGE                  A                    

USA  Australia  (126 mi)  2001  ‘Scope  d:  Baz Luhrmann

If ever there were a movie that was created with Blu-ray in mind, this is it, as this is a kaleidoscope fusion of music and color that explodes off the screen, delighting viewers with the scandalous opulence of a tantalizingly seductive musical.  This has all the magnificence of Broadway come to the screen, among the most extravagant visual spectacles ever made, yet it’s all underscored by an old-fashioned love story that also gets the small details right, especially the small snippets of lyrics from popular songs that elevate the dizzyingly emotional love scenes.  Shot by John McAlpine using the brightest, near hallucinogenic use of colors, the Bollywood style stage presence of beautifully choreographed frenzied excess, luxurious costumes with exaggerated use of makeup and wigs, and a set design like none other that you’ve ever seen, so elaborately detailed and wildly expressive.  Set in the bohemian district of Montmarte in Paris in 1900, we zoom into the city with the cutesy style of AMÉLIE (2001), hovering among the rooftops overlooking the Moulin Rouge nightclub where John Leguizamo as Toulouse-Lautrec is perched wondering what to present for his next show, but the narration is being described by a man seen inside a window with a typewriter, Ewan McGregor as Christian, a struggling writer who has moved there to be caught up in the spirit of revolution, where all that matters is “truth, beauty, freedom, and most of all, love.”  When Christian stumbles upon Toulouse-Lautrec at a rehearsal session where they are conceptually stuck, he brilliantly resolves the writer’s block by singing “The hills are alive with the sound of music…”  The tone is set, as immediately he is welcomed into the fraternity of fellow bohemians. 

What he discovers is a scandalous burlesque and dance review featuring scantily clad women in neon colored costumes dancing the French Can Can that would rival the Roman Circus for decadence in a show called “Spectacular Spectacular.”  Enter Nicole Kidman dressed only in lingerie and a hat lowered on a trapeze bar singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in her most breathy Marilyn Monroe imitation.  Satine is the star of the show, the sexiest, most alluring woman known as the “sparkling diamond,” the highest paid courtesan in Paris.  To save the show, as the club is going bankrupt, she is urged by the master of ceremony, Jim Broadbent from Mike Leigh’s TOPSY TURVY (1999), to use her feminine charms to get a pompously overdressed rich Duke (Richard Roxburgh) to invest in the show.  But she mistakes the poor starving writer for the aristocratic Duke, which leads to a comedy of errors and misdirection.  His mind grasping in desperation, knowing he’s about to lose the girl, Christian breaks into song, a quietly affecting rendition of Elton John’s “Your Song.”  Like a deer in the headlights, she is struck by the emotional allure of the song, which leads to a spectacular rooftop romance fantasia where they do a tribute to the umbrella sequence from SINGIN IN THE RAIN (1952), only here they dance engulfed in a sea of fog cast in a blue light, which eventually turns animated, dancing under the moon next to the Eiffel Tower in a picture postcard image of Paris.  Like magic, one song and they are in love.  Once she discovers his real identity, confusion ensues as she then has to meet the real Duke, who she now has no interest in and must steal away all waking hours with her new love while lying and concealing this scandalous affair from the Duke.  What follows are more enchanting love songs sung from the rooftop of Satine’s giant elephant shaped bedroom, each using a line from a popular love song to create a surge of emotional fascination with the idea of love, as it is beautifully explored through song lyrics.  This technique would later be used in Julie Taymor’s ACROSS THE UNIVERSE (2007) where the lyrics from Beatles songs actually tell the narrative throughout the entire movie.  Luhrmann brilliantly uses this device throughout the film, using a varied selection of lyrics from Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy” to Kurt Cobain’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” from Madonna’s “Material Girl” to the Beatles “All You Need Is Love” to Dolly Parton’s heartfelt “I Will Always Love You,” all to wonderful effect, as he cleverly mixes the mood with the visual enchantment onscreen.  

Once we see where this is heading, right out of French literature or opera, as Satine, like Camille or Mimi in La Bohème, is dying of consumption, so what becomes immediately apparent is not only can the Duke not have her, but no one can, as she’s covering up the fact she is near death.  But the Duke grows fanatical and deliriously enraged when he realizes he’s been made a fool of and insists upon conditions that force the hand of the actors, using threats of violence as well as his insistence of taking over the theater.  Still, making a fool of him is one of the more delicious aspects of the film, filled with humor and cleverness.  Without it, the film drags near the end and runs into a more contrived finale that seems to go on forever, with Luhrmann never finding the right ending, so he keeps throwing more at the audience.  Kidman is sensually vulnerable throughout, yet also a sexual force, so her strength of character is vital to this film, while McGregor is a wide-eyed idealist where love is literally sweeping him off his feet, where from one moment to the next, song lyrics just keep flying out of his head.  The two are positively enchanting together, and with that core of authenticity, all that excessive Bollywood window dressing that’s meant to dazzle the senses with hyper-saturated colors, inventive set designs, and a wonderful neverending energy just leaves the audience overwhelmed yet yearning for more.  This is the film NINE (2009) needed to be but wasn’t, falling flat with its own disinterest.  Luhrmann’s film on the other hand is constantly reinventing itself, finding astonishing ways to continually find the emotional resonance of a simple love story, seemingly simplistic and overdone, but given an entirely new vision here that continually mixes moods from psychedelic to comedic farce to delirious spectacle to rock “n” roll, an unapologetically artificial dreamworld that holds up over time by remaining outrageously inventive and alluringly spectacular.            

The Great Gatsby (2013)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wife, Zelda, and daughter, Frances (a.k.a. Scottie), celebrate Christmas 1925 in Paris

 

THE GREAT GATSBY           B 
Australia  USA  (143 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Baz Luhrmann       Official site

No one makes movies of lavish extravagance like Baz Luhrmann, simply no one, which is one of the pleasures of seeing his films.  Perhaps the reincarnate of Ken Russell’s dizzyingly flamboyant films of the 60’s and 70’s, where it often felt like the mad passionate style had overtaken any cinematic value and content, as the director showed less and less restraint, nonetheless he was always an original.  In much the same way, Luhrmann can be counted on for dazzling visual imagery, which some find exaggeratedly overboard, simply too much, where Moulin Rouge (2001) remains the best creative expression of his unique style.  While many find Gatsby unfilmable, as so much of the novel is a description of observances and inner reflections, recounted in narrative form, which may have been best served by the noirish Black and White era of 1949, where bleak lives and a hard-boiled, yet descriptive narration offers a literary feel, where the dark overall mood of criminal intrigue trumps individual character.  That version accentuates the criminality of Gatsby’s underworld lifestyle, while also attractively featuring Shelly Winters as the wronged woman, an ill-fated femme fatale who throws herself in front of a fast-moving automobile with tragic results, all part of the spiraling downturn in Gatsby’s life.  There is a 1926 Silent version, but one wonders how such a contemporary literary classic would hold up in exaggerated looks and gestures alone, lacking much of the description and complexity of the book.  The 1974 version with Robert Redford as Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy is simply too bland for most people’s tastes, never generating any heat, and never rising to the level of an American classic, while the made-for-TV 2000 version is already forgotten.  One might think an outsider’s view in the form of a brash and exuberant Australian director Baz Luhrmann might do the trick, where he’s not so beholden to the literary material and could openly express his free-wheeling style, as the period reflected is the Roaring Twenties, an era of American jazz and a cultural renaissance, including writers, dancers, and musicians in Harlem, where women in America, Canada, India, and Europe received the right to vote, new abstract modern artforms flourished, like Art Deco and Surrealism, but also the contemporary literary elite were heralded with laudatory reviews while living and treated like royalty in Paris, including the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote the source novel for this film.  But alas, it was not to be, and while entertaining throughout, this is yet another version that fails to connect the intricate power of the work to the movie audience.

Part of the problem with this version is the casting, as Leonardo DiCaprio is out of his element as Gatsby.  Like Redford, another man with a pretty face, he fails to get underneath the mysterious man behind the mask, showing us nothing onscreen that he hasn’t already expressed before, using a really phony accent, as if trying to emulate the Boston inflection of the Kennedy’s, and the film even revives the tragedy of the Chappaquiddick incident, which forever derailed the Presidential ambitions of Ted Kennedy.  Carey Mulligan exudes the pixieish flirtatiousness of Daisy, whose artificiality defines her, along with her reliance upon overcontrolling men, too afraid to ever express her inner self, becoming a tragic lost soul in the process.  Unfortunately, Tobey Maguire as the narrator and writer Nick Carroway is well meaning, but too naïve and passive, not at all reflective of Fitzgerald’s own opulent lifestyle of extravagant wealth and lavish parties, where he and his wife Zelda were renowned New York celebrity socialites, making several excursions to Europe, mostly to Paris, where their faces were all over the magazines and newspapers.  Maguire is simpy too meek of a character to exhibit much insight into the world he is drawn into, kind of blending into the wall for most of the picture, not really affecting much of the action, even though he is the observant eyes and ears of the movie, along with a giant billboard with spectacles seen at the entryway to the road to New York from Long Island, emblematic of the eyes of God watching over all who pass by, becoming an unseen moral conscience.  Surprisingly, the performer who comes across the strongest is fellow Aussie Joel Edgarten in perhaps the most despicable role in the film, Daisy’s unfaithful, double-crossing husband Tom, a man of wealth and social prestige, who flaunts it whenever he can, openly speaking his mind, a man used to getting his way, kind of gruff and rough around the edges, a bit like Howard Duff, becoming domineering and callous to Daisy’s needs, ordering her about like one of the hired help, who are almost exclusively black.  Tom is an East Egg blue blood, a borderline racist who believes people belong in their place, and that includes wives and the would-be nouveau rich living across the bay in the West Egg of Long Island where Gatsby’s mansion sits, people who accumulate wealth by illicit means that he believes are without culture and sophistication. 

The actual story behind the story, unraveling the mystery of Gatsby, doesn’t become apparent until near the end, where prior to that he’s simply seen as an immensely wealthy man with some dubious underworld business connections, probably making his millions on bootleg liquor, much like Joseph Kennedy Sr, though that has always been speculation, as he also made his millions on stock market insider trading, which was not outlawed at the time, becoming one of the richest men in America.  Gatsby is seen as a man who opens his home nightly to hoardes of party revelers, providing them food, drink, and musical entertainment, while he rarely shows himself, preferring his reclusive status until Nick moves in to a tiny cottage next door, quickly becoming fast friends, especially when he discovers Daisy is his cousin.  You’d think these party sequences would be the film’s cinematic extravagance, interestingly pulsating with a hip hop soundtrack, but Luhrmann only shows what’s necessary, never extending the shots to give the viewer the full effect like he does in MOULIN ROUGE.  Instead he accentuates the rekindled secret love affair between Gatsby and the scandalously married Daisy, where the best part of the film is the sudden shift to romantic feelings of optimism and hope, where Gatsby, who otherwise feels much like a weird stalker, building it all for her hoping one day she would walk inside his doors, and finally their lives suddenly come together and resemble his dream.  It can all happen, but Daisy gets cold feet while at the same time Gatsby reveals a more desperately controlling nature, where it’s all so close that he can taste it, seen alone at night at the end of the pier reaching out towards the green light emanating from the end of her pier across the bay, a warning for boats in the dark.  Nick is there to see it all, when in one stiflingly hot summer afternoon, they decide to get everything out in the open, so Gatsby begins to push Daisy into uncomfortable territory, forcing her to commit when she’s not yet ready, manipulating her in much the same way as that cad of a husband, where one’s no better than the other.  While Fitzgerald’s own life story is about the corrosive effects of wealth and the emptiness of the decadent lifestyle, reflected in the waning egoism and dwindling male self-confidence, destroyed by the continuing effects of alcohol, Luhrmann’s Gatsby is a stark reminder that “All that glitters is not gold,” which comes from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, where in each, senseless tragedy awaits those that fail to heed that message.

2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #4 Holy Motors

HOLY MOTORS            A 

France  Germany  (115 mi)  2012  d:  Léos Carax

My guess is the more experience you have with cinema, the more you’ll like this film, which defies any narrative construction, yet continually exhilarates in its pure love and devotion to film language, much of it feeling like bits and pieces of old films all strewn together like broken parts to make something completely new.  Those with a need for rational explanation need not enter here, as to many this will simply not make sense, but certainly anyone who does give this a try can’t help but be blown away by the sheer originality and mad energy of the movie itself.  In other words you don’t even have to like it, but you can appreciate the unbridled joy with which this film was made, almost like a love letter to cinema itself.  Carax was once the boy wunderkind of cinema, where at 24 his first film Boy Meets Girl (1984), shot in black and white on location in Paris, won the Youth Award at Cannes, while his next Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) (1986) was a post New Wave primary color extravaganza that won the Alfred Bauer Award at Berlin, an award given to a movie which opens new perspectives in film art.  Given a free reign over his next project, the boy wonder’s cost overruns created the most expensive French production in history, where production was halted several times before finally releasing the extravagant The Lovers of Pont-Neuf (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf) (1991), a sumptuous and romantic tribute to both Paris and lead actress Juliette Binoche, which was a colossal flop in Paris, not released internationally until 1999, thirteen years after his previous film.  When his next film POLA X (1999) was a huge flop as well, his career was all but finished, where we heard literally nothing about the man throughout the next decade, returning another thirteen years later to Cannes with this mammoth work that literally defies description, but is so ingeniously wacky that parts of the movie are simply off-the-charts hilarious, once again starring Denis Lavant as the director’s alter ego and stand-in for the creative force required to make an art film in the modern era.

This devoutly uninhibited film has such an edgy, stream-of conscious style that it likely summons different thoughts and ideas inside every head that shares this film experience, which plays out more like performance art, where Lavant is an outrageous chameleon-like character who literally takes on various disguises and different theatrical personas as he injects himself into the streets of Paris causing mayhem wherever he goes.  What’s intriguing straightaway is the viewer questions whether this character is even real or whether it’s some form of visiting spirit from a world beyond.  While this may not make sense to some, but it was reminiscent of The Phantom of the Opera, a scarred or disfigured character hidden from the world due to some deep personal tragedy or loss, living instead in a subterranean or alternate universe, which seems to be a blend of the future mixing with the past, where the connecting thread is the pure unadulterated joy of cinema.  Lavant is known by a half a dozen different names, but he’s driven around the streets of Paris in a white stretch limousine, where Édith Scob, the aged star of a French horror film more than 50 years ago, Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), is the driver, also dressed all in white, including the color of her hair.  She may as well be the driver of dead souls, as she transports Lavant around town where he sits in the back and receives 8 daily case assignments one at a time, literally transforming himself into character for each assignment, where the limo is largely a dressing room on wheels, where Lavant spends most of his time getting perfectly into disguise, becoming the manifestation of faded roles from cinema history which might die out altogether if he didn’t attempt to resuscitate them back into the modern world.  Much like the use of memories in Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienb... (1961), which may die if not remembered, Lavant seems to be the reincarnation of near dead movie roles, literally attempting to breathe new life into them, but taken completely out of context when set on modern streets, where he is literally out of place, out of time, where people on the street are aghast at what they see.  

The mix of fabulously designed set pieces and on-site locations are part of the brilliance of the film, as Carax does create an otherworldly impression throughout, where never for a single moment does anyone in the audience have any idea what’s happening next, where the built-up intrigue of these imaginary characters and what they’re doing returning back to earth is befuddling to say the least, where even the actors onscreen seem in complete bewilderment at Lavant.  In one assignment, like a creature from the silent era, Lavant turns into a little green Leprechaun with bright orange hair, a hideous creature that never utters a word but instead makes weird animal sounds.  When he crawls out of a sewer and leaps into a crowd on the street, people back away in disgust, where a high fashion photographer is taking photos of Eva Mendes as an haute-cuture fashion model, a statuesque figure of beauty, but this beastly creature instantly grabs the photographer’s attention, where he orders one of his underlings to immediately sign the creature up for a photo shoot.  When she attempts to communicate with the monster, she ridiculously attempts to relate by asking if he’s ever heard of Diane Arbus, famous for taking pictures of giants, dwarfs, and other freaks of nature.  Lavant simply grabs the model and carries her off into his lair in the sewers beneath the city that exists in stillness and in silence.  In such a short period of time, the marvel of invention that occurs in front of the camera in this one sequence is wildly imaginative and extremely cinematic, using rousing music in much the same way there are frequent cinema homages, as Carax is simply re-inventing cinema by reconnecting all the unused pieces, much like reassembling all the broken body parts of mannequins that we see strewn around the empty warehouse settings.

Midway through his day, Lavant’s assignment book reads “Entracte,” or intermission, conjuring up quick images on early archival black and white film stock of a shirtless man peforming before a crowd, like a circus act, which quickly cuts to Lavant leading a march of accordion players "Let my Baby Ride" by Doctor L (RL Burnside Cover)- Holy Motors OST  YouTube (3:20), an utterly enthralling piece of music that literally comes out of nowhere adding a sense of exhilaration to the film.  Who knows where Carax comes up with these ideas, where Lavant enters a Tati-like modern glass designed skyscraper dressed in a glow in the dark outfit where he does outrageous MATRIX-like dances in a darkened room, where he receives instructions from an unseen voice, like Warren Beatty in Mickey One (1965), becoming highly experimental using a dazzling strobe light effect, eventually joined by a shapely woman contortionist who can bend her body like a pretzel, with Lavant somewhere entwined.  Using two cinematographers, Yves Cape and Caroline Champetier, the streets of Paris often become hallucinogenic-tinged, or the shapes of buildings literally melt, creating phantasmagoric images of a reality unfolding into itself, where the world is seen in utter transformation.  Purely by chance, Lavant runs into an old flame, where he wanted to use Binoche, who apparently would not agree, so director Claire Denis suggested he use Kylie Minogue, where they have an extended sequence together that feels altogether unworldly on the rooftops of Paris, a direct reference to Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001) that starred Minogue, literally bringing in film segments from every bit of the director’s own imagination.  This may be too much for some, who may wonder what in the hell is going on, but this is a quintessential dip into the collective subconscious history of cinema, where the entire movie is a subliminal flash in time, spliced together using bits of broken pieces, where the finale with Lavant finally at home, innocently looking out his window at night feels like he’s just a kid waiting for the arrival of Peter Pan.