People who criticize Moulin Rouge (the original movie, not the newer stage show) are missing the point of the movie entirely.
See, most musicals, even Jukebox ones, exist to tell the story of the characters. They build the costumes around telling you who they are and why you should care. They strive to make the characters three dimensional and full of life so that you understand them as people. That’s why you cry during “It’s Quiet Uptown” or “A Little Fall Of Rain”. These characters have become almost real to you and you can embrace that feeling. That’s not what Moulin Rouge is.
Let’s start with the set up: Moulin Rouge is a story written out by a character in the film. He looks untidy, sad, and almost manic in his writing. When the story unfolds from there we already know how it ends. She dies and he goes on to write the story.
Now for the story itself. Moulin Rouge can get a lot of hate for being a farce, ridiculous, and shallow. That’s the point, because
Christian is a bad writer.
Canonically the only thing he writes well off the cuff is poetry, and even there he struggles. He gets bursts of inspiration and makes beautiful music but then when he’s asked for plot he shrugs and throws six tropes in a bucket and hopes for the best.
Toulouse has an unidentifiable accent and knows the bohemian scene better than Christian, so he becomes the character who can only speak the truth.
Zidler has an iron grip on Satine so he plays the evil Maharajah, a stand in for the Duke that Christian both hates and acknowledges the power of.
The Duke has no true character because Christian only ever saw him as a possessive man of wealth. Was he actually evil? Christian doesn’t care so we don’t know.
And Satine herself never escapes the way Christian first saw her. She is a sex worker, a dancer, a beauty, but in the end she is simply a possession.
Christian writes an epic ballad of love (Come What May, the only original song in the movie) to her, but he still offers her no agency. No freedom. Satine is as one dimensional as the rest of the cast. She is thrown from one owner to another with the only promise of escape being a man who hates everything her life is. He hates her work, he hates her coworkers, he even begins to hate the show he is writing. In the end Satine never even truly had a choice. Christian gives her the ultimate tragedy and she dies of consumption after singing her heart out. Not how that disease works of course, but what does he know? He’s a sheltered boy who joined up with a weird acting polycule and immediately falls in love with a performer he sees.
So what is the real story? We know how he wants us to think it ended. Satine loved him and tragically died in his arms after he heroically avoids death himself. Her final words urge him to write their story. It’s beautiful, it’s tragic, and because Christian is the only three dimensional character we feel his pain and sorrow. But he is an unreliable narrator. What really happened?
Well, it’s certainly possible that he fell in love with a sex worker who continued to do her job, leaving him to fester in jealousy as she plied her trade with a Duke. Or maybe she does die of consumption after a show, maybe he’s even there for it. Maybe they even love each other.
Or maybe Christian is a man who meets his weird upstairs neighbors, goes to the brothel/ burlesque house often, and when the star of the show dies tragically he writes a story that places himself in the middle of it all. All these people he barely knows in a world he doesn’t understand who he turns into flat characters that allow him to fantasize that just for a brief period of time, he was loved and loved in return.
Anyway I probably give this too much thought. It simply intrigues me to think about what the real story could be behind our unreliable narrator.
Come what may, I’ll enjoy this musical until my dying day.
