Actors - Moulin Rouge!

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Moulin Rouge!

	Actors - Moulin Rouge!

Moulin Rouge! is a 2001 Academy Award winning musical film directed by Baz Luhrmann. It tells the story of a young British poet, Christian, who falls in love with the star of the Moulin Rouge cabaret actress and courtesan, Satine. It uses the colourful musical setting of the Montmartre Quarter of Paris, France. Some plot details, specifically the poor artist and his dying lover, bear relation to the Giacomo Puccini opera La bohème (which Baz Luhrmann has also directed several times), including references to the "Bohemian" subculture. Otherwise, the plot greatly resembles that of Giuseppe Verdi's opera La Traviata, especially the end. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and the Academy Award for Best Actress for Nicole Kidman, but won only the Academy Award for Best Costume Design and the Academy Award for Best Art Direction. The film was shot entirely at Fox Studios in Sydney, Australia.

Five other movies with the title Moulin Rouge have been made.

Description

Moulin Rouge! is a cinematic opera that has a storyline and structure that is said to be inspired and influenced largely by Italian grand opera: exuberant music, colourful visuals, elaborate sets and costumes.

It also has some elements of Bollywood films such as a simple story line with a simple conflict, an heroine with melodramatic disease and two-dimensional characters. Moulin Rouge! also has songs adopted from contemporary musicians. For example, it samples popular songs like Chamma Chamma from the Hindi movie China Gate
, Nature Boy by David Bowie, Lady Marmalade by LaBelle (the Christina Aguilera/Pink/Mya/Lil Kim cover having been commissioned for this film), Madonna's Like a Virgin, the titular song of The Sound of Music
, and Smells Like Teen Spirit
by Nirvana—all within the film's first twenty minutes. The film uses so much popular music that it took Baz Luhrmann two years to secure all the rights to the songs.

The film takes established rock music songs and modifies them to fit into a tale of a turn-of-the-20th-century Paris cabaret, blending swirling camera motion, loud music, and dancing to powerful effect.

Primary cast

Nicole Kidman
: Satine
Ewan McGregor
: Christian
John Leguizamo
: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Jim Broadbent
: Harold Zidler
Richard Roxburgh
: The Duke
Garry McDonald
: The Doctor
Matthew Whittet: Satie
Kylie Minogue
: The Green Fairy
Plácido Domingo: Voice of Man in the Moon

Plot summary

The theme of the movie is love and its age-old conflict with wealth and materialism. The main character, Christian (Ewan McGregor), is a writer who comes to Paris at the height of the Bohemian movement—a city of artists, parties, and absinthe. He falls in love with the main singer of the Moulin Rouge cabaret, Satine (Nicole Kidman), who unknowingly suffers from a terminal case of tuberculosis.

Through mistaken identity, Satine believes Christian is the Duke who will invest in the cabaret's new show and keep everyone employed. Meeting him in the Elephant Room for a tryst to seal the deal, Satine is at first taken with Christian's poetry (a medly of 20th century love songs) but is shocked to realize he's actually a penniless Bohemian poet. The real Duke arrives then. To cover up Christian and Satine being in an intimate moment, they improvise a proposal of an Indian-themed musical spectacular, also on the theme of love in conflict with power. The Duke is impressed, and accepts that Satine will be busy with rehearsals and in close contact with Christian, the writer.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Moulin Rouge! ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Moulin Rouge!; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay