Week 5 – Moulin Rouge (2001)

• Moulin Rouge
• Released: 5/9/2001
• Starring: Ewan McGregor, Nicole Kidman, Jim Broadbent, John Lequizamo, Richard Roxburgh
• Director: Baz Luhrmann
• IMDB Page

Welcome to week 5 of 52 Films, 52 Portraits! This week’s choice is brought to you by my baby sister, Mamie!

Mamie and I at her Senior Art Show Celebration earlier this year.

Mamie recently graduated from college with an art degree and is super duper talented. She is five years younger than me, and the youngest of my two siblings. She lives in Alabama and is working part time while she does her art and prepares to go to grad school.

When asked about her favorite movies, Mamie said that she often leans towards comedies, citing Bridesmaids as a favorite that was almost her top choice. However, she said, the majority of the movies at the top of her list were ones that had meant something to her growing up. In addition to Moulin Rouge, she also mentioned That Thing You Do, RENT, The Notebook and Bring It On as movies that meant a lot to her during her formative years. These movies had a huge impact on her at an early age and helped to shape who she is as a person. RENT, she said, taught her pretty much everything she needed to know about life.

If you had asked everyone in our family what movie we thought that she would pick, most of us probably could have guessed that she would pick Moulin Rouge. When I told my dad that she had picked it, he talked about the first time that she watched the movie. She was probably 7 or 8 and our parents didn’t expect her to really understand the story too much, but she got so totally invested beyond just the music in the film and ended up sitting on the couch and crying for a long time after the credits rolled.

Despite this, Mamie says that she was immediately hooked and began a period of watching and rewatching the movie over and over again. She watched it to the point of wearing herself out on in and not watching it again until she was 16 years old, nearly a year later. As the movie came to an end this time around she says she cried harder than she has ever cried in her life. Shaking, fetal position, the whole works.

Mamie and I are very close and we both loved this movie when it came out. Like Mamie, I hadn’t seen the movie in years and watching it again brought back a lot of great memories from about 15 years ago.

The music from the film really held up and it was interesting how the songs meant different things to me now than they did 15 years ago. It was also interesting how many more songs there were than I remembered there being, and how I actually knew them all as something more than the ‘song from Moulin Rouge‘ this time around.

The performances in this movie were really fantastic. Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman were so amazing and their chemistry was so strong. After this movie came out, they were two of my favorite actors for a long time.

Baz Luhrmann is such a great director, as well, with a really interesting point of view that makes his movies stand out. Another of his films was also picked for this project, but it’ll be a while before we get to that one.

Anyway, I definitely enjoyed watching this week’s film. It’s one of my all-time favorites and it was really fun to revisit it after so long.

Mamie’s parting words in regards to films was simple: “Tv shows are better.”

Next week: No Country For Old Men