One of my top five films ever, Baz Luhrmann's 2001 ode to the hedonistic lifestyle of 1800s Paris, Moulin Rouge was essentially a generic story that was all in the telling. Part melodrama, musical, Bollywood, and costume drama, Luhrmann's driving force behind it seemed to be to ramp everything up to 11. In an interview in Venice Magazine in 2001, Luhrmann claimed that,
We set out to make a cinematic form which is the antithesis of the current cinema vernacular. Where the audience participate. Where they are awakened. Where they are alive in the cinema.
It was like nothing else. 12 years later, one Australia, and a bunch of commercials, and Luhrmann has just released The Great Gatsby, a film he had originally planned to make immediately following Rouge. The excitement precipitating it has been palpable, despite controversies over the new cover, the book has sold over a quarter of a million copies of the Luhrmann edition. Originally scheduled to be released at Christmas 2012, a canny piece of jiggery-pokery has seen it now as a Summer blockbuster, perilously but ingeniously pitched between Star Trek Into Darkness and Iron Man 3, two films aimed squarely at a young male audience. It's a move that has clearly paid off, as a predominantly female audience has pushed it over $100million domestically, clearly sold on the romance between Daisy and Jay, and Leo DiCaprio once again perched as the tragic romantic lead. Or should that be the romance between Satine and Christian?
The aim of this post is to look at the similarities between both Gatsby and Rouge in an attempt to understand the director's motives in creating two texts so clearly connected beyond superficial comparisons.
The Great Gatsby (2013, Warner Bros. Pictures)
For comparative purposes, I'm going to purposefully ignore a lot of the over-arcing narrative similarities between the two films, as I feel that given Rouge's somewhat deliberately generic nature (as part of the form it is paying homage to) render these a little too simplistic. Instead, with particular focus to the introductions of the two films I will attempt to analyse the use of technical and cultural codes to show the similarities between the films.
Both films open with a nod to their respective time periods - whilst there is no 'red curtain' in Gatsby there is another nod to the artificiality of creating the era. Rouge's opening had us examining the first type of cinema, on a long tracking shot seeing the title card of 'Paris 1888' framed in a particularly silent movie manner. Gatsby repeats this trick, showing us the 'actual' credits for Warner from the 1920s, attempting to at once immerse us and make us aware of the period.
The one odd concession that Luhrmann has given to translating the piece to the screen is that he has given us a wraparound narrative in order to allow us access to Carraway's thoughts. So it is that we see Carraway sitting in a darkened room, looking bedraggled, recovering from alcohol abuse in a grey sanitarium. It's a neat little trick that allows Luhrmann to comment somewhat on the hedonistic excess of the time. Much like the absinthe drinkers of Paris 1888. Yes, Rouge's wraparound is incredibly similar, in fact, down to the depressed alcoholic writer (McGregor's Christian) who has taken to typing out his thoughts on a typewriter - with key phrases that then appear on-screen. Granted, in Gatsby, Luhrmann has graduated beyond simple diegetic titles, allowing his words to wisp in and out of the screen like Gatsby's dreams. It's as if he's somehow decided to re-do his opening with a bigger budget and a more serious text. Yet that itself seems false.
The similarities continue. Gatsby is alluded to much like Satine, seen in glimpses and flashes (before his grand appearance, as fireworks explode, to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, akin to Satine's Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend) and we follow the same trick of 'rewinding' film, via a grand reverse tracking shot. In Rouge, this is to rewind to a more glamorous, pre-absinthe, revolutionary Paris. In Gatsby, it is the city of promise, New York. Once again, the two are like-for-like in their 'diorama-esque' artificiality. At this point, I began to wonder if Luhrmann was trying to point to his past glories - that he has already made 'The Great American Australian Movie'.
And, much like McGregor's Christian, we see Maguire's Carraway arriving in New York, complete down to the freeze-frame on his young, naive face, highlighting the contrast from the opening and the change in mood. It's quite unbelievable.
And there's more. The recurrent motif of 'Come What May' replaced by Lana Del Ray's 'Young and Beautiful', the party scenes, full of frenzied close-ups, then repeated in stop-motion slow-mo to emphasise the underlying seediness. It's as if we're remaking the same film.
Which leads me to the question I pose - why re-do Moulin Rouge? Particularly when Luhrmann has been given one of the most incredible pieces of source material to start from? It leaves me with one of three thoughts, and none of them are particularly pleasant ones.
1) Luhrmann's bag of tricks is sadly empty, and this is all he knows. I would hate for this to be the case - there are moments of Gatsby that are incredible. The most stunning is the climax in the Plaza Hotel in chapter 7, where oddly enough, Luhrmann dispenses with the gimmicks and removes all non-diegetic sound and any sort of whizzy special effects, putting the actors' performances front and centre. It almost makes it seem as if these events are played out in some sort of alternate-universe stage play, and is invariably both striking and useful revision material for all English teachers to utilise post DVD-release (this one included!)
2) Luhrmann believes that Rouge, somehow needed to be improved upon, and by placing a classic piece of literature on top of the framework of that film, it is his chance to revisit and 'fix' the film. Despite its flaws, Rouge is (forgive the pun) a sparkling diamond of a film, and one that stands on its own two feet without the lineage of a long-revered text to back it up.
3) Luhrmann is Gatsby. At the end of chapter 6, after telling Nick Carraway of a moment, five years ago, where they went for a walk, Gatsby talks about repeating that one inescapable moment. Rouge was like nothing I had ever seen on screen, a level up from Romeo and Juliet. Carraway tells Gatsby that he can't repeat the past. Gatsby, looking around 'wildly' responds, much as I sadly feel Lurhmann would,
Why of course you can!
