The story in Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! (and you leave the exclamation mark out at your peril) is Camille, the Dumas story that forms the basis of La Traviata and has been reworked numerous times. Luhrmann and co-writer Craig Pearce's take on the story is as distinctive as their 1996 Romeo and Juliet which starred Leonardo di Caprio. Having just seen the film I'm brimming with things to say and to stop it sprawling too much I'll address each aspect in turn.

Performances
Nicole Kidman is a revelation in this role, to the extent that her ex amour Tom Cruise was in Magnolia. Forget her qualified success in Eyes Wide Shut, this is closer to her smoldering stage presence in The Blue Room (another turn of the century classic, though set in multiple bedrooms across Vienna). In close-up she is alluring, bedecked in sumptuous costumes she evokes the poise of Hepburn at the height of her powers and in ensemble work she holds the camera regardless of the speed at which it tracks and pans through the giddy Parisian nightclub. Ewan McGregor is a perfect partner, one of the best displays of wide-eyed innocence since fresh-faced Guy Pearce in LA Confidential. The protagonists are well supported by Jim Broadbent as the theatre owner, Roxburgh as the rival lover and a great little cameo by Kylie Minogue as the Green Fairy (a euphemism for Absinthe, the notorious and oft-banned madness-inducing drink favoured by the Montmatre crowd). All the cast are required to sing and dance and they do so with a commitment and enthusiasm only surpassed by the director himself.

Design
Whatever the fate of the film in terms of the headline Oscars, there seems little doubt that it'll pick up a slew of awards for set and costume design. Where costume dramas usually drown in an orgy of period detail and painstaking authenticity, the design team here seem to have responded to a brief that simply required that they fill the screen with colour and incident befitting a decadent milieu. It is as much a nod to the spectacle of Hollywood at its most extravagant as anything else. Imagine Fantasia with real sets.

The music
I've left the best to last. When Ewan McGregor falteringly starts to sing "The hills are alive with the sound of music" the film hangs in the balance. A historical faux pas? A breaking of the illusion? Its like Ziyi Zhang's first flying leap in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the moment when you think "OK, so the rules aren't quite what I imagined them to be". Get it wrong, place it in front of the camera in an apologetic, half-hearted manner and you've lost the audience. Get it right and you have broadened your palette, opened up new possibilities and can start calling the shots in the world you have created. Luhrmann gets it very right with his selection of contemporary songs sung by the characters, be it Bowie's Heroes, Madonna's Like a Virgin to name but two more extended borrowings, but the film is peppered by hooks from a panoply of songs, often only an instantly recognisable line (such as that from Whitney Houston's theme from The Bodyguard). Aside from the minor pleasure of recognition, this borrowing seems at once to look back (or forward from 1899) to Eliot's tissue of quotations in The Wasteland and forward (or back from 2001 to Umberto Eco) to the post-modern notion that even in our most earnest and heartfelt moments we recycle the sentiments already circulating in the culture. The quotations are simultaneously corny (they are by their very familiarity, cliches) and dense, carrying with them all the emotional intensity of the song. If a picture really does buy you a thousand words, then the exchange rate for song must be at least a couple of hundred. The Roxanne medley is just one instance where multiple songs are intermixed, joined, played against each other and the delivery by Jacek Koman is so reminiscent of Tom Waits (especially in One from the Heart). For all my enthusiasm for the music, it doesn't strike me as an immediate soundtrack purchase. The arrangements are stunning but they are not easily divorced from the film (and the album is a single CD where it really needs to be the length of the film to do it justice) and favours commissioned material from the great and good of the music industry over outings by the main characters. Still, if you are wondering what to get me for Christmas I wouldn't turn down the chance to hear Beck's Diamond Dogs cover or Kidman's One day I'll fly away, but chances are I'll buy the DVD to hear them as they should be.