Moulin Rouge Film Analysis

Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge is a timeless, captivating film that incorporates great cinematography and a daring endeavor by Luhrmann to reinvent a musical. Moulin Rouge is about the night club in Paris called The Moulin Rouge, and the journey of a young writer who falls in the love with the star dancer and finds himself caught up in a love triangle.

Baz Luhrmann uses different techniques to convey images to his audience. An example of this is mise-en-scene, cinematography, and editing to draw the viewer into his film. Mise-en-scene is a term used to describe the design features of film production, which essentially means “visual theme” (Wikipedia). When applied to film, mise-en-scene means the various things that are involved before the camera and its arrangement which includes the following: composition, sets, props, actors, costumes and lighting (Wikipedia). The sets for this production were mainly just a set of Paris. Moulin Rouge’s Paris was a digital creation that started as a series of Photoshop collages that were used to then build a digital Paris. The digital shots helped connect the various different sets into one total neighborhood. With a single, sweeping shot the camera could travel from “bourgeois Paris through streets of toothless rabble and into Christian’s garret,” according to Chris Godfrey (www.cinema.com). In an interview with Baz Luhrmann, he expressed that they wanted to use digital power, not to create perfection, but rather imperfection. He wanted to reproduce camera shake, deconstruct the imagery and create a sense that this film was hand-made (cinema.com).

The actors in this film were also hand-picked well. Nicole Kidman played Satine, the star dancer at Moulin Rouge and Ewan McGregor played Christian,...

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...This conveys the message that Christian’s life has drastically deteriorated since Satine died.

Some have criticized the production of Luhrmann’s film Moulin Rouge, but to most it is a timeless classic that lets you dive into a fantasy world of music, love, and sparkle. To summarize the words of Julie Talen, part of the brilliance of Moulin Rouge is that Baz Luhrmann leads us by the hand into a world that not only doesn’t exist but never could.

Baz Luhrmann is telling us we’re in his world now, which has rules. Either you take his hand and hold on tight, or you let go, like the child in a fairytale, and are lost forever. (Talen, 2002).

Moulin Rouge and Baz Luhrmann were successful in recreating the timeless classic of a musical. The right cast paired with Luhrmann’s daring and impressive cinematography skills and his selection of music created a masterpiece.