This was Luhrmann’s starting point: to bring the genre up to date. In using young stars like Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, Luhrmann was not only building his own publicity, but also preparing for modernisation- where Everyone Says I Love You stayed very much with the old guard, staring as it did Julia Roberts, Tim Roth and Woody Allen, Moulin Rouge was a love story for an entirely younger generation.
The visual style is very much for the modern audience as well; the two long shots over Paris, through the streets on Montmartre, past the Absinthe bar and into Christian’s room hold the current record for the longest special effects in the history of Hollywood.
So, having brought the style up to date, Luhrmann began to work on the content. The film carries numerous references to its predecessors, including the use of the first two chorus’ from ‘The Sound of Music’ and a scene in which Christian twirls around the Eiffel Tower, umbrella in hand, a la Singin’ in the Rain. However, it is also careful to maintain it’s modern motif, with Kylie Minogue making a brief cameo (with, in a little-known fact, Ozzy Ozbourne on vocal FX) and the vast majority of the film’s music being drawn from the charts of the last five years. Like A Knights Tale after it, this film draws the audience of the twenty-first century in to its historical setting though identifiably culturally modern signposts. Despite being set in late 1880 France, the film looks and feels like any other modern production- the stifled, stuffy world of the costume drama is obviously one that did not sit well on Luhrmann’s shoulders, as he observes, claiming it would be “contrary to my style”.
The concept of examination is one that has run throughout the history of the musical. The main strength of the musical, according to Dyer, is that they offer “aesthetically utopian solutions to real needs and contradictions”. Taken to its logical extent, this argument could be used to claim that the role of the musical is to examine real-life issues and difficulties through a process of simplification, abstraction and resolution. The issue is first simplified through rendering it into song, dance and visual technique. Genne Kelly described this stage as ‘the dance-drama’, and is visible throughout Singin in the Rain; whenever the characters face problems or adversary, it is first introduced through a song and dance number, in which the relative positions and relationships are made clear. In Moulin Rouge an example of this stage would be the opening of the Elephant Love medley, from the lovers watching each other from their rooms to Christian’s song finally winning over Satine. Further evidence is seen in that all of the characters fall in love to music; Christian to ‘Diamonds Are A Girls Best Friend’, and Satine and the Duke both to ‘How Wonderful Life Is’, from Christian and Satine respectively.
This rendering into music also serves to enforce the abstraction of the issue. The song and dance is often used as a metaphor for the actual events, while the events themselves are unshown, or even simply alluded to. This kind of abstraction is shown in the ‘Roxanne’ scene, on several levels;
- firstly, the song itself, in which the Narcoleptic Argentinean and Nini ‘Legs-in-the-air’ (as she is credited) act out the story of the courtesan and the man who falls in love with her;
- secondly, the montage, through which Christian externalises his jealousy toward Satine and the Duke;
- thirdly, in which the actions of the dancers reflect Christian’s jealousy, and
- fourthly, in which Satine sees and hears Christian and the issue is brought back to naturalistic, narrative reality.
Finally, in the manner above, issues are resolved, often through re-simplification. Dyers’ notion that the musical is a method through which problems are solved through simplification is borne out here, as in many cases, despite an hour and a half of plot building, the matter is often ended with a simple gesture. In the case of Moulin Rouge, it is through Satine singing the secret song, in Singin in the Rain, through the opening of the curtains. This is perhaps symptomatic of a wider trend in Hollywood, but it is certainly a trait that the musical has made its own.
This trend towards examination is as internal as it is external. More than any other genre, the musical seems prone to self-examination. Moulin Rouge is set around a play and deals with, albeit in a cursory manner, a dichotomy between fame and love; Singin in the Rain, also set around a production, deals with a similar conflict.
In any examination of genre, the musical is a good place to start. As Steve Neale says, “The musical has always been a mongrel genre”; as I mention in the opening paragraph to this essay, there is some contention over whether it is a genre at all, with many observers labeling it as a style of sub-genre, nothing more. However, I would argue that genre exists to group films together by style as much as content; the uniting feature is far more clear between Singin in the Rain and Moulin Rouge than between, say, Singin in the Rain and State and Main, despite the disparity of content.
A similar argument rages over the necessity and value of genre distinctions. Grant writes,
“Stated simply, genre movies are those commercial feature films which, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories though familiar characters in familiar situations.”
This is perceived as true; however, it is also perceived as exclusive. If we accept, at least for the moment, that a genre is simply a type of film, then all films, not just the commercial, fall into the genre system, be it the Hong Kong wu xia pan, the documentary or the Japanese samurai film.
As noted in Steve Neale’s Genre and Hollywood, most modern theories on genre derive from Romanticism, and Romantic attitudes to genre were largely hostile:
“This hostility was directed not just at the putatively routine, formulaic and impersonal nature of genre, but also, as a corollary, at their putative lack of creativity, originality and individuality
The consequence of this was, the repetitive nature of genre was stressed in the theoretical approaches used to describe it. By association, the codes and conventions that made these genres what they were were also cheapened, so that convention became known as cliché, structure became regarded as formulaic, and characters, stereotypes.
However, these concepts and theories were mostly carried by the very critics and theorists who would later in their careers set out to contest them. As a result, those who wrote in praise of the genre system found themselves using the same epithets, indeed the same arguments, from a different perspective, as those who did not. For example, Schatz’s argument that
“A genre film… involves familiar, essentially one-dimensional characters acting out a predictable story pattern within a familiar setting”
is very similar to the one put forward by Grant five years later.
In summary, then, genre is a tool used by Hollywood to allow the consumer certain pre-formed conceptions about the film that they are about to see. As Baz Luhrmann proved, genre is by no means restrictive, and is always open to reinvention- while audiences will often be content to see the same, formulaic genre films, originality will always have an audience.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Collins, J. The Musical (Gehring 1988)
Dyer, R. Entertainment and Utopia (Altman 1981)
Grant, BK. ‘Introduction’, Film Genre Reader (ed.) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986)
Neale, S. Genre and Hollywood (Routledge, 2000)
Schatz, T. Hollywood genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System (New York: Random House, 1981)
FILMOGRAPHY
BBC2. The Show Must Go On (6th September 2001)
INTERNET RESOURCES
Fox Entertainment, 2001
‘The Orphean Myth’, Club Moulin Rouge
Robert Spande
‘The Three Regimes: A History of Film Music’, UselessIndustries
