Text Me When You’re Done: Moulin Rouge!

 A redheaded woman in a sleeveless red dress embraces a man she’s passionately kissing. His figure is almost inconsequential; all we see clearly of him is his face, locked as it is with hers, as well his left hand, which grasps her back, as if hoping to hold her ever closer. The rest of him is lost to the darkness that envelops them both, pierced only by the glittering red district lights of the most famous Parisian club at the turn of the nineteenth century. Its iconic windmill serves as backdrop for this striking piece of early twenty-first century movie marketing memorabilia. The poster’s simplicity feels decidedly demure compared to the dizzying cinematographic confection it was promoting: Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 jukebox musical, Moulin Rouge! 

I was sixteen when the film first came out; eighteen when I first saw it, and then barely nineteen when, touring the campus art fair for some dorm room decorations ahead of the new semester, I decided to buy the poster to put on my wall. Even as I moved, first off campus the following year, and later still, to another country where I got a place to myself as I began grad school, the poster came with me to adorn each new wall. Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor—or rather, Satine and Christian—long served as guardian angels to whom I continued to look for romantic inspiration and protection as I navigated the first throes of adult relationships under their watch. 

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, Luhrmann’s film taught me how to fall in love. It cracked open the cynicism I’d nurtured in my teenage years which had taught me to be wary of such impulses. A frenzied retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth filtered through a modern musical extravaganza, Moulin Rouge’s jukebox soundtrack features the likes of Madonna’s “Material Girl” and Elton John’s “Your Song”—at once too much of a cliché and perhaps already a tad declassé. Yet the film’s aggressive evangelizing about the power of that “many splendored thing” we call love had felt revelatory when I first watched it. In large part because I sat next to a college friend I’d been crushing on for quite some time and with whom, soon after the credits rolled, I notched up my very first sexual experience. It’s that detail perhaps that made an otherwise outrageously exuberant movie so central to how I think about my ideas of love and romance—not to mention jealousy and desire.

The closet has a way of inuring you from earnestness, from open displays of affections. Any show of vulnerability, of the true nature of your desires, is a risk. It’s a danger you cannot afford. And so I’d refused to wear my heart on my sleeve, decrying any signs of lovelorn tales, in life as in fiction, as fanciful foolishness. Sarcasm became my armor. Detachment, my main mode of defense. 

As the gorgeous courtesan Satine tells Christian, the penniless writer who falls for her almost immediately upon seeing her perform at the Moulin Rouge, all those “silly love songs” around us teach us all the wrong lessons. That’s her line of defense in the aptly-titled number, “Elephant Love Medley,” a mashup of some of the twentieth century’s most enduring love anthems. Pilfering from The Beatles (“All You Need is Love”) and Dolly Parton (“I Will Always Love You”) with aplomb, Christian showers the alluringly aloof Satine with every cliché-riddled ditty he can muster. It’s overly endearing and outright exhausting. It is no surprise he eventually wears her down. Satine has long sold herself to the highest bidder, yet eventually she finds herself giddy and giggly over how content she feels with nothing more than one man’s professed adoration.

If my twenties were guided by the intoxicating ebullience of the “Elephant Love Medley,” as the years went by I began gravitating more and more toward a more provocative, and endlessly thornier number—where the message is not about how all you need is love, but that such passions can drive you mad: “Tango de Roxanne.” Satine, all but betrothed to the cabaret’s benefactor, The Duke, has realized she can no longer fend him off in favor of her doting Christian. She is to bed The Duke to prove her allegiance to him and confirm in no uncertain terms that she cares not for the writer, leaving Christian in tattered tears over his aggrieved rage and jealousy—all of which is telegraphed in a blend of The Police’s “Roxanne” and Mariano Mores’s classic instrumental “Tanguera” tune.

“Tango de Roxanne” is Moulin Rouge! at its most electric. At once an over the top number featuring endless dancers and as frenetic an editing hand as you’re likely to find in a modern movie musical, it offers a simple message: passion, while fiery and oft-fodder for relationships and artistry alike, can quickly turn into something more flammable and plenty more destructive. The song is a cautionary tale about the perils of loving a woman who sells herself: “When love is for the highest bidder there can be no trust,” an Argentinean Moulin Rouge performer coos at Christian as he introduces the song, “Without trust there can be no love.” In essence, this is a number about how hard it can be to harness and control one’s own feelings, harder still to try to break away from the story you’ve wedded yourself to. It can be dangerous to uncouple love from desire, lustful encounters from intimate connections.

This is a carefully choreographed dance between these characters, between what they say they want and what they’re willing to give up in return, is what is most thrilling about the number. As the Argentinean regales Christian with the tale of a woman (the titular Roxanne) who cannot be loved since she gives her body away to anyone who’ll pay, the Moulin Rouge’s dance company show us precisely how the tango, a dramatic dance of tension, captures what it feels like to want to control another who simultaneously wants to be rid of your embrace even as they crave it all the more. Best to distill your jealousy into an ardent kind of dance than to have it consume you. All these years later, I still wonder whether it wasn’t that number which played in my head the more I found myself disenchanted with the very storybook romance—and self-controlled denial—I’d committed myself to.

I no longer have a poster of Moulin Rouge! above my bed. More than fifteen years ago, once I’d moved in with my boyfriend (who later became my husband) who preferred his posters (of highbrow films like Vertigo and Casablanca) artfully framed and mounted on the walls, I finally rolled it up and bid it goodbye. I’m not sure where it’s gone since, whether it survived the cross country move we later made together, let alone the divorce that soon followed. I almost wish I still had it with me to help add a bold accent to my current barren bedroom wall. Especially since I find myself once more turning to that kaleidoscopic ode to truth, beauty, freedom, and above all, love as a guide and a balm for the unknown future, what my forties are to bring. 

For I’m still looking, it seems, within its dazzling costumes and postmodern ditties, for lessons both romantic and skeptic, lurid and lovely, to wonder, still, whether the greatest thing I’ll ever learn, as Christian assures me, is just to love and be loved in return.