ABOVE, BOTTOM: SATINE’S ELEPHANT BOUDOIR OPPOSITE, TOP: THE MOULIN ROUGE
that feature clowns4 – I’ve found it useful as an analytical framework for cracking open less obvious examples. Moulin Rouge! is one such case. With the twentieth anniversary of the film almost upon us, not to mention a live stage reimagining already in our midst,5 there’s no better time than now to revisit this new-millennial blockbuster. The critical response to it upon its release – ‘a karaoke musical’ defined by ‘real artifice’,6 ‘an extravagant exercise in style’,7 ‘deliberately simplistic’8 – may have been mostly dismissive, but recent opinion has definitely warmed in line with the largely favourable general-public response.9 Moreover, set in the countercultural district of Montmartre, centring on a cohort of artists and undesirables, and propelled by a protagonist aspiring to become a ‘bohemian revolutionary’, Moulin Rouge! has all the ingredients for a truly transgressive piece of cinema. But how do (decadent) style and (romantic) substance work together in Luhrmann’s ‘spectacular spectacular’?
‘Here we are now – entertain us’ In ‘Rabelais and His World’, Bakhtin examines the mechanisms by which medieval carnivals created an alternate world ‘outside officialdom’, where conventional power hierarchies were dissolved and protocol was dispensed with. What these achieved was a form of ‘societal reversal’, however short-lived, that granted the lower classes respite from any sense of discontent. In inviting all citizens, no matter their station, to partake in libations and merriment, carnivals also allowed the citizenry to reconnect with their ‘animalistic’ urges, which are ordinarily subdued by sombre labour and subordination
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