Moulin Rouge is a kind of movie museum. Not the kind of museum in which, say, the coins of the last 200 years are arranged neatly in glass cases (and very interesting, no doubt, for numismatists), but the kind to which you might take your children, feeling sure they and probably you will have a good time. This is the sort of museum which makes a virtue of wild eclecticism, which tries anything it suspects might work, and which, whatever its faults, is too energetic to be dull. Baz Luhrmann has carried bricolage, the art of using what comes to hand, to new heights: his triumph is in both making it look as if anything—everything—goes and making sure that there is nevertheless a remarkable coherence to his phantasmagoric spectacular. 

Here is a wide-ranging cultural display, at the service of a narrative that aims to illustrate the truth of the famous old ‘Nature Boy’ lyrics, sung at start and finish in case you miss the point (impossible anyway), that ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn/Is just to love and be loved in return’. And just before anyone says cynically, gosh, how true, it should be recorded that Luhrmann and his stars get away with it, but more of that in a moment. The setting is Paris 1900, a Paris whose centre is the Place Pigalle whose centre, in turn, is the Moulin Rouge nightclub, presided over, entrepreneurially, by Harold Zidler (Jim Broadbent) and, at the level of star power, by the courtesan Satine (Nicole Kidman). Plunging into its glamorously depraved depths is a fresh-faced young provincial, Christian (Ewan McGregor), who quickly becomes enamoured with Satine, writes a show for her that will be funded by a nasty milord, the Duke of Worcester (Richard Roxburgh), in return for Satine’s favours. What we and Zidler know is that Satine is dying—of consumption, of course. All this is watched over by a motley collection of bohemian types, most famously the altitude-challenged Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo); I hesitate to say ‘dwarf’ because he doesn’t really, prosthetics notwithstanding, seem short enough.