"Moulin Rouge: Like The Windmills Of My Mind"
By: Maggie Stone

Goths are always looking for the strange and unusual, the far-fetched and the ridiculous. I may have found what they are looking for -- all in one package!

"The Moulin Rouge" (English translation: "The Red Windmill") is the perfect name for this fanciful, provocative movie feast-for-the-eyes. The well-produced mind-bender film reminded me of Holland -- fresh, colorful, exotic, and highly steeped in eroticism. My head was spinning as I tried to keep up with the clever camera cuts -- which were both thrilling and exhausting. Watching was similar to a true-life sexual experience, with it's introduction, seduction, titillation, raw emotions and even rawer flashes of flesh. When I left the theater, I felt as though I saw an adult version of a children's story-teller Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale -- while stoned on LSD! (Or perhaps like famed dirty-old-man artist, Toulouse Letrec, on absinthe!) The fantastical film's colors were so bright and exaggerated, they verged on becoming characters in of themselves -- similar to an orgasm's heady afterglow. Hedonism...in Technicolor! Mardi Gras...on celluloid! "Willy Wonka" via "Penthouse" magazine!

Still, "The Moulin Rouge's" paper-thin, yet convoluted and contrived, plot was a hilarious and witty love story. The meant-to-be-together-by-fate-yet-damned lovers are: "Christian", the good, but poor, sincere poet and, "Satine", (Is this French slang for a feminine...SATAN?), (played with gusto by the sudden ex-Mrs. Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman) who is a famous courtesan who dances shamelessly at the decadent Moulin Rouge nightclub. "Satine" is widely-known as the most beautiful woman in Paris and thus dubbed, "The Sparkling Diamond". "Christian" (good boy -- or "virginal innocent") and "Satine" (bad girl -- or the classic "hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold") outline the primary conflicts of this devilish endeavor's themes -- battle-of-the-sexes, love-conquers-all, good-versus-evil, Freud's "Madonna-Whore" complex and pop-psychology's infantile "Wendy Complex", love-and-lust, etc., except it has a good beat and you can dance to it.

When "Christian" and "Satine" first meet, she mistakes him for a notorious "Duke" who she is directed to seduce in order to get the him to finance a new play for the Moulin Rouge. "Satine" believes the play will be her chance to show the world she is a "real actress", maybe the next Sarah Bernhardt, legitimizing her beyond being considered a common prostitute.

At the same time, "Toulouse" tells "Christian" to meet with "Satine" so, if she likes his poetry, she could persuade her boss to hire "Christian" as the writer of the new play. Upon reading his sappy work, "Satine" naturally loves "Christian's" poetry and, in time, she comes to love him -- even though management ordered her to follow their carnal rule religiously: "NEVER FALL IN LOVE!". (Opps!) When they kiss, the proverbial firecrackers burst across the Paris skies. This act of passion is redemption for tainted "Satine", virtuous masculinity for the pure "Christian"! But happiness is not to last in this boy-meets-girl, boy-and-girl-have-major-problems fable.

Of course, eventually the real "Duke" makes an entrance (Boo! Hiss!) and is willing to finance the new play, but for a price. And the price is: (Da-Dum!) "The Sparkling Diamond". The "Duke", being a man of some hefty means, wants what he wants, and he wants "Satine" -- and not in a good way. His possessiveness and jealousy threatens to destroy the lovers, and, if they wouldn't end their love as he demands, he will -- by destroying everyone and everything out of spite.

But, in the end, the disease TB, an incurable illness at the turn-of-the-century (sort of like AIDS is today) puts a finale to the lovelorn twosome without anyone's help. Break out the hankies.

Isn't this a "Dudley Dooright" plot line, with "Love Story" overtones, adding a dash of "oh-my-gosh-let's-put-on-a-play" pabulum from the "Andy Hardy" series -- all put in a music video blender?

The muddled-but-earnest movie is a musical-gone-awry -- nothing I could ever imagine. The songs made the entire theater's audience laugh out loud. The radio-play pop songs of today were uniquely incorporated within the movie's plotline which supposedly took place over one hundred years before the songs were written, such as: "Like A Virgin" by Madonna, "Roxanne" by the Police, and the Beatles, "All You Need is Love". Wow! A "Period" movie you could hum along to! Hey, this is a fantasy -- remember?

"The Moulin Rouge" was great fun and I plan to see it again. I also have to watch especially close for a cameo by master thespian, Ozzie Osbourne!

Of "The Moulin Rouge" -- Goths may enjoy the psychedelic MTV effects, the unintentional "Rocky Horror" audience-participation aspects, and the eye-candy "Alice In Sex-land" bustiers tease. This is "Pink Floyd's The Wall" of the Y2K era, only with "lite" social commentary. Just a reminder -- you have to time your drugs for maximum effect.