The Moulin Rouge was an actual place in Montmartre, just outside Paris, at the end of the 19th century. It was a nightclub
of legendary proportions, where the Bohemians bohemed till all hours of the night with the cancan dancers, prostitutes and bartenders. If Kurt Cobain had been around then, I can imagine his "Smells Like Teen Spirit" being sung as a paean to nihilistic youthful debauchery. Since he wasn't, we have Baz Luhrmann's film "Moulin Rouge" to fill in the blanks, re-creating the nightspot with modern music and vivid emotions, juxtaposing images, ideas and icons with recklessly methodical abandon. "Moulin Rouge" is a love story -- a rather simple one, really, dressed up to appear grandly operatic, which it does. At that outset, we meet our narrator and protagonist, Christian (Ewan McGregor), a poet who informs us that what we're about to see happened one year earlier, and that the woman he loved is now dead. So much for the possibility of a happy ending.
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