Firmly breaking with a bizarre tradition of opening with movies that ranged from the merely routine to the downright awful, this year's Cannes Film Festival, the 54th, kicked off with an exhilarating opener on Wednesday night when it presented the world premiere of Baz Luhrmann's magical musical, Moulin Rouge, to a loud, sustained standing ovation in the Festival Palais. Just when it seemed like the screen musical had been consigned to that great genre graveyard in the skies - Alan Parker's underestimated film Evita was the only significant liveaction movie musical in the past two decades - Luhrmann has revived the genre with the wealth of cinematic imagination and the tremendous panache he applied to his first two films, Strictly Ballroom and Romeo and Juliet.
Once again Luhrmann takes a familiar storyline - this one echoes Orpheus in the Underworld - and revitalises it with an acute postmodern sensibility and a palpable passion for the medium to create an irresistible and richly accomplished entertainment that is, by turns, boldly colourful, self-deprecatingly humorous and ultimately touching. And it is consistently ravishing to behold.
It opens on a shot of a proscenium arch as the conductor strikes up the band, the curtain opens and the 20th Century Fox logo appears centre-screen, accompanied by that familiar theme music. Flickering silent movie-style credits follow, as the narrator is introduced - Christian (Ewan McGregor), a sensitive, idealistic Englishman who, defying the warnings of his puritanical father, arrives in Paris in 1899 and becomes caught up in the coterie of Toulouse-Lautrec (a skilfully miniaturised John Leguizamo) and the Montmartre set at the Moulin Rouge, where Christian falls head over heels for the star attraction, the sensual Satine (Nicole Kidman).
The attraction is mutual, but as happens, the course of true love fails to run smoothly, and there are complications, such as Satine's dual role as a courtesan and the obsessive attentions of a venal, wealthy duke (Richard Roxburgh) who levers his financial clout to enlist the assistance of the mercenary Moulin Rouge owner (Jim Broadbent) to have his evil way with her.
So far, so traditional in simple narrative terms, but from the outset it's clear that Luhrmann is intent on breaking the rules of the genre. There are very few original songs in this highly original musical which taps into the emotional resonances of popular music from the latter part of the 20th century for this turn-of-the-19thcentury tale.
So the dancers at the Moulin Rouge perform a frenzied routine to Lady Mar- malade (sung by Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mya and Pink); Kidman, surrounded by a slew of tuxedoed male dancers segues between Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend and Material Girl; Broadbent draws every salacious overtone upfront in his rendition of Like a Virgin; Kidman and McGregor (with a little soundtrack help from Placido Domingo) perform a love medley that features All You Need is Love, I Was Made For Lovin' You, U2's Pride, Don't Leave Me This Way; Bowie's Heroes; and McGregor plaintively sings Elton John's Your Song.
Both McGregor and Kidman reveal strong, appealing singing voices in a movie which further mines the music vaults by having characters speaking familiar lyrics as dialogue. Crucial to the exposition of the love story is the striking screen chemistry between Kidman, on radiant form, and McGregor, who hasn't been so impressive on-screen since his breakthrough in Trainspotting. In a particularly fine supporting cast (which fleetingly featured Kylie Minogue as a flying green fairy), the versatile Jim Broadbent lets loose at its most irrepressible.
Shooting on highly stylised, extravagantly dressed sets, Luhrmann flamboyantly stages the song and dance numbers with dazzling and meticulous choreography that fills the widescreen frame with energy and dynamism. Luhrmann clearly exults in the thrilling theatricality of the genre, which he communicates so infectiously to the audience in this exuberant, intoxicating spectacle, a blissfully romantic paean to the power of love.
What the notoriously fickle Cannes jury will make of Moulin Rouge remains to be seen at awards night on Sunday week. Unfortunately, it may be to its disadvantage that last year's jury misguidedly gave the Palme d'Or for best picture to Dancer in the Dark, a cold, botched musical which, coincidentally, also featured a tragic heroine and explicit references to The Sound of Music.
This year's jury is chaired by the gifted Norwegian actress, Liv Ullmann, who was in competition at Cannes as a director last year with Faithless, which shamefully received nothing from the festival jury. Ullman's 10-member team - many of them unusually young for the task, by Cannes standards - includes the Taiwanese film-maker, Edward Yang, who deservedly took the best director prize at Cannes last year for Yi Yi (A One and a Two); the unpredictable US director and former Monty Python member, Terry Gilliam; the Tunisian film-maker, Moufida Tlatli, who made The Silences of the Palace; the Italian director, Mimmo Calopresti; the French writer, Philippe Labro; British actress Julia Ormond; two French actresses, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Sandrine Kiberlain; and the young French actor and director, Mathieu Kassovitz, who made La Haine.
THE competition programme over the days ahead is topheavy with auteurs, featuring new work from Jean-Luc Godard, Nanni Moretti, Ermanno Olmi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Manoel De Olivera, David Lynch, Joel and Ethan Coen, and a formidable Asian presence led by Hou HsaoiHsein and Shohei Immamura. Only one film directed by a woman is in competition - Catherine Corsini's La Repetition - but the most controversial omissions are films from Germany and the UK. The Germans are understandably furious at being snubbed yet again by Cannes, which this year turned down, among other German offerings, Tom Tykwer's Kieslowski-scripted Heaven.
Ireland is represented officially at Cannes by Barry Dignam's three-minute Chicken, a contender for the Palme d'Or for best short film next weekend. Of several Irish productions in the Cannes market, the first to be screened yesterday afternoon was Disco Pigs, which was launched at the Berlin Film Festival in February and marks a truly distinctive feature film debut for Kirsten Sheridan after a number of highly promising short films.
So astutely adapted by Enda Walsh from his innovative and critically acclaimed stage play that it belies its stage origins, Disco Pigs deals with a young Cork couple Pig (Cillian Murphy) and Runt (Elaine Cassidy) - born on the same day and in the same hospital. They grew up in adjacent houses and developed such a deep-rooted romantic affinity that they speak their own invented language (which is very loosely similar to Droog-speak in A Clockwork Orange).
The movie is set in the weeks leading up to their joint 17th birthdays as the close, loving and innocent little universe they share begins to implode when a chain of events unleash Pig's capacity for violence. Their world, in all its soaring highs and crushing blows, is depicted with a wrenching authenticity and a sympathetic tenderness by director Sheridan, whose visceral visual style propels the drama with terrific flair and pacing.
Cillian Murphy, who has screen presence to burn, unflinchingly portrays Pig as a charming psychopath, an unexploded bomb which could go off any time, in one of the most outstanding performances ever delivered on-screen by an Irish actor. Elaine Cassidy (from Felicia's Journey) indelibly catches Runt in all her moral and emotional confusion. The impressive cast also notably includes Darren Healy, along with Tara Lynne O'Neill, Brian O'Byrne, Geraldine O'Rawe, and as a headmaster, Eoghan Harris. Disco Pigs is pure cinema, and essential viewing when it opens in Ireland next autumn.
The only dud note struck in these early days of Cannes 54 came from the new Abel Ferrara movie, 'R Xmas, which is so slight and rambling an exercise that it's more likely to turn up at the bottom of your video store shelves than on cinema release. Set in New York at Christmas time in 1993, before the election of Rudy Giuliani as mayor and his zero tolerance crackdown on crime, it deals with an unnamed immigrant couple (relatively well played by two actors from The Sopranos, Lillo Brancato jnr and Drea DeMatteo) whose affluent lifestyle, financed by drug dealing, is threatened by corrupt cops and rival criminals. Most of the cast confuse self-conscious over-emoting for acting in this flimsy effort which goes nowhere slowly. Very slowly.
Michael Dwyer continues his reports from the Cannes Film Festival in The Ticket next Wednesday
