Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Moulin Rouge!
2001 · Baz Luhrmann · Moulin Rouge! on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera fall out of the sky into Paris. (camera)
It comes down over a toy-sized Montmartre, goes through the windmill sails, and lands inside the room. No lens could make that move. Luhrmann opens by announcing that physics does not apply here.
Payoff: The world picks you up and carries you in, which is how the film intends to move you all night. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: motion leaves the bodies and passes into the set and the cut.
Watch for red and gold soaking every surface in frame. (light)
Donald McAlpine lights to footlight logic, hyper-saturated, never once pretending to daylight. Red is not the color of a curtain here. It is a condition the entire scene sits inside.
Payoff: Color carries the temperature of each scene, so you feel the film turn before the plot tells you. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this affective color: a color that absorbs a scene instead of belonging to any object in it.
Count the shots in the opening cabaret number. (cutting)
Jill Bilcock cuts the early numbers into a strobe of very short shots landing on beat and accent. Orientation goes out the window. Rhythm rather than space is what the cut serves.
Payoff: Tempo is doing the storytelling, which is why the first twenty minutes split audiences so sharply.
Listen for songs written a century after the setting. (sound)
A man in 1899 opens his mouth and Elton John comes out. Then Nirvana, Madonna, The Police. The cast sing their own vocals in re-orchestrated medleys stitched from other people's hits.
Payoff: Two eras run at once and neither is demoted to a joke, because the film needs both of them true. In the reading: series of time / peaks of present. The reading calls these peaks of present: contradictory presents coexisting and refusing to sort into before and after.
Watch how often the frame is arranged like a stage. (staging)
Catherine Martin composes each shot as a proscenium crowded with dancers, mirrors, streamers, and gilt. The windmill, the elephant, and the illuminated sign organize the space into tableaux.
Payoff: Every act here is also a performance for somebody watching, which is what the whole place was built to do.
Once you have seen it
Watch Spectacular Spectacular against the plot around it. (structure)
The show inside the show restages the outer story so closely that the performers end up playing their own lives in front of an audience that believes it is watching a play.
Payoff: The club and its show reflect each other until the performance and the life being performed cannot be pulled apart.
Watch the typewriter in the first scene and the last. (structure)
Christian narrates from afterward, hammering out his grief in a bare room. The whole film turns out to be a lament composed after the fact by the one person who made it out.
Payoff: What you are watching is what escaped the club, and the typewriter is the crack it escaped through.
Listen to 'Come What May' and hear a hand-me-down. (sound)
It is the only song written for the story, and Luhrmann had composed it earlier for Romeo + Juliet and carried it over. The most sincere thing in the film arrives second-hand.
Payoff: Nothing here is original and the feeling still lands, which is the wager the whole picture is making.
Carry this in: Take the film at its word that nothing on screen is real. It asks you to cry anyway.