report date: May 10, 2001

By JOHN HARKNESS

CANNES - If the great sin of mainstream commercial filmmakers is an inability to resist the money shot, the besetting problem of most "art" film directors is an inability to get to the point. The 2001 Cannes Film Festival opened with Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, a hypertheatrical original musical with Nicole Kidman as Satine, legendary star of the Parisian nightclub, Ewan MacGregor as the penniless writer who falls in love with her and John Leguizamo as Toulouse Lautrec. No, really.

Moulin Rouge has already attracted attention/controversy over its use of modern pop tunes from Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend to Elton John's Your Song, and I'm prepared for an anachronistic disaster on the level of Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet.

Well, not quite - for one thing, Luhrmann's not pissing on a classic, and for another, the musical is rather more elastic about what is and is not allowed in the form. The use of modern tunes in a late-19th-century setting is actually cleverly done, and Moulin Rouge occasionally rises to remarkable heights, mostly when Luhrmann stops directing everything to within an inch of its life and lets the considerable charmism of Kidman and MacGregor carry the picture. Luhrmann has a music video aesthetic - he's not happy unless the camera is spinning in mid-air, the sets are morphing into something else and there's 19 things happening simultaneously that he can cut between - the musical numbers in Moulin Rouge operate less as musical numbers in any classical sense than as trailers for themselves. Sting's Roxanne is actually brilliantly staged as a tango, but I wish that, just once, Luhrmann would let us see a dancer make a couple of moves in sequence.

He is plainly a talented director - he has a terrific eye and knows how to edit - but he's so afraid of the apparently diminished attention span of his audience that he refuses to trust his material. Moulin Rouge has a chestnut of a story - basically, boy meets whore in a bohemian setting - but it's a story that has worked in the past and should work in the future.

Despite its presence in the Competition, Moulin Rouge won't bring home any scrolls or plaques.

It did, of course, bring Nicole Kidman to walk up the red carpet on opening night.

The follow-up to Moulin Rouge, just to get us into serious mood swings, is from Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-Eda (After-Life) whose new feature, Distance, brings together four virtually strangers who were related to the members of a small apocalyptic cult that poisoned Tokyo's water supply some years earlier. If After-Life managed a certain narrative, emotional rigor simply on the basis of its No Exit premise, Distance plays like a bizarre cross between Shinji Aoyama's Eureka (people recovering from a traumatic event) and The Blair Witch Project (annoying people lost in the woods with a shaky-cam).

Maybe my jetlag shaped my response to Distance, but I've always agreed with Hitchcock's argument about dead space in films. If you show a character arriving somewhere, the audience will probably assume that he got there somehow. You don't need to show the whole journey, especially if nothing happens. And I won't bore you with the extended-play version of how Air France cancelled my flight and lost my luggage.

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