There's plenty I can't forget soon enough. The quick, choppy cutting makes the movie feel spit up in pieces instead of served as a whole. And the frenetic plot repeatedly grabs attention away from what should be the movie's central focus, the love story between Ewan McGregor's penniless writer Christian and Nicole Kidman's showgirl-courtesan Satine. Worse, Luhrmann's fondness for tight close-ups of the garishly painted showfolk of early 20th century Paris reduce them to Fellini leftovers.

But Luhrmann is a tricky director. I'm not sure how he does it, but his movies have a way of reshaping themselves in your memory after the fact -- it's as if they have viruses built into them that spring to life a day or so later, mysterious microorganisms that go to work in your brain to smooth out a movie's flaws and heighten its most sensual or exhilarating moments.

I know because the virus worked on me. When I first saw Luhrmann's 1996 "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet" I perceived the movie as nothing short of a travesty, save for the performances of its two young leads, Leonardo DiCaprio and particularly Claire Danes. But a day or two later, I felt an inexplicable yearning to see the movie again, and the second time, I fell in love with it. I hate that movie's editing to this day; Luhrmann is clueless about how to organize his ideas, or even how to distinguish his good ideas from his terrible ones. That's without a doubt his major shortcoming as a filmmaker. But I found myself willing to weave a path around the movie's cracks and faults, led by Luhrmann's choice of (and use of) music, and by what I finally understood, the second time around, as his brave, honest and reckless heart.

"Moulin Rouge" is more ramshackle and harried than "Romeo + Juliet," and it doesn't have the same languorous resonance. The story, written by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, is simple and desperately operatic. (It also, incidentally, has nothing to do with John Huston's earlier film of the same name.) "It was 1899, the summer of love ... " the voice-over begins, as young Christian (McGregor) relays the tale of how he came to Paris to become a writer, only to find himself entangled in a web of tragedy and loss.

	Moulin Rouge Directed by Baz Luhrmann Starring Ewan McGregor, Nicole Kidman, John Leguizamo, Jim Broadbent View the "Moulin Rouge" movie trailer RealVideo 56k | 200k Print story E-mail story

Christian falls in with a bohemian crowd led by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo, wonderful when Luhrmann remembers to tone down the dazzle around him), who introduces him to the redheaded dazzler Satine (Kidman), a showgirl at the Moulin Rouge, which is run by sozzled impresario Zidler (Jim Broadbent). Satine falls for Christian, but their love is doomed; she's practically been sold to the rich Duke of Monroth (Richard Roxburgh), a possessive, impossible tyrant. She is also, unbeknownst to Christian, withering away from consumption.

In pacing his movie, Luhrmann is like a hamster on a wheel, so desperate to keep our attention that he forgets to tell us where to look. He swings the camera around just when we need it to linger; he cuts away from details just when we're ready to drink them in. He never allows us to sink into the movie's romance, and that's a problem. The whole thing feels scattershot and dyslexic, a noisy clatter of letters on a page that fail to fall into a logical and recognizable order.

But I've already started to gather from "Moulin Rouge" a collection of details that I want to hang onto forever, things that I've rescued from the rubble of Luhrmann's passionate carelessness. Production designer Catherine Martin gives us a glittering nighttime Montmartre that's sprawling and alive. Its chief features are a magnificent, jewel-encrusted elephant that houses Satine's boudoir and a huge neon sign that glows through the night outside Christian's shabby garret. Luhrmann used the same sign in his terrific 1993 Australian Opera production of "La Bohème," where it substituted as moonlight for the characters' trysts. There, it spelled out simply "L'Amour" in flowing script. Here, it reads "L'Amour Fou," an advertisement for what's ahead as well as a warning.

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