“Moulin Rouge” is one of the best movies ever made. I can say that with absolute, undeniable certainty. No, not the one with Nicole Kidman. The one with Zsa Zsa Gabor and Jose Ferrar. The one directed by John Huston. The one with Toulouse Lautrec in it. Excuse me, I hear that the new Moulin Roulin has Toulouse-Lautrec but he doesn’t get to paint. Doesn’t get to paint! Sounds imp ossible, but my spies are extremely accurate and sharp-eyed about such things.
The real, or (ahem)1952, Moulin Rouge, is the one I saw when I was eleven. It had a profound effect on my life. No, I didn’t become addicted to absinthe or head immediately to Paris or learn to dance the can-can (well, maybe a little). What I did acquire was an overwhelming desire to learn to draw like Toulouse-Lautrec and I have been drawing ever since, never so well as Lautrec but with his example always before me. The “Moulin Rouge” you ought to see is that old one, the one with art in it.
The performances are delicate, the music, by George Auric, is light and perfect, and the cinematography is unbelievably beautiful. It is probably the best movie about art ever made. About Toulouse-Lautrec, it is not perfectly accurate. His father, made to seem an ignoramus about art in the movie, was actually, along with HIS father, several uncles, and assorted cousins, mad about drawing. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec grew up in a house with a full appreciation of pencils and paper. Henri and his father disagreed about many things but they both loved art. Toulouse-Lautrec had the full backing and appreciation of his family. And Henri, shown lonely and dismal, was a convivial fellow who had a wide circle of friends, family and admirers, even after liquor spoiled his brilliant mind and sociable, gracious temperament. He did not break his legs in a dramatic fall downstairs, but more heartbreakingly, when he stood up from a chair, in the kind of break that happens to very fragile, very aged people. It happened to him when he was a teenager. That his legs never healed and that he was terribly afflicted by alcoholism and died young, that is true. That he was ugly is not altogether true. Depends what you regard as ugly. For a fascinating set of photographs of Lautrec, see A Toulouse-Lautrec Album, with photographs and captions by his family, out of print but maybe in a library near you. For a look at the paintings, go to the Chicago Art Institute, the Metropolitan, or, if you are extremely lucky, the Louvre, where the unfailingly, breathtakingly marvelous paintings, drawings, and posters are on display.
It doesn’t matter how wrong the movie is in some biographical details or in the minutiae of costume (the real can-can dancers wore no knickers!) it is correct about Toulouse-Lautrec’s art, the magic of his drawing, the power of his painting. And, while critics have been known to call Henri’s art cold and heartless, the movie more accurately shows it as warm and light, a play of swift, immediate color and light, full of loving attention to line and shadow,backed by dancing, teasing music. Jose Ferrar does a brilliant job with Lautrec, conveying both pain and courage with subtle shading, revealing the obsessive, joyous quality of great art.
Even Zsa Zsa Gabor does a good job in this movie. She was, perhaps, just old enough to be the product, culturally, of a slightly older time, closer to Lautrec’s time than to the nineteen fifties. She wore long gloves and big hats with authority and sang with allure if not with grandeur. And Paris looked ... as Paris ought to look, slightly raffish and misty, romantic and seedy, the epitome of a big, blowsy, wonderful city.
The real “Moulin Rouge” can change your life, the way art can, even in a movie, even if you aren’t ready for it. Moulin Rouge, if it doesn’t entice you into becoming an artist, can at least open your eyes to the possibilities alive in the humble pencil and the blank sheet of paper.
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