A late-comer’s appreciation of John Huston’s 1952 Moulin Rouge, based on Pierre La Mure’s novel about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec:<\/p>\n
Although the French wikipedia states that HT-L’s contemporaries said he was not bitter or inhibited because of his hereditary deformity (dwarfism and disfigurement, exacerbated by a childhood accident; his parents were first cousins), but rather an ebullient bon vivant, and even something of an exhibitionist, the novel and movie portray him as deeply wounded and stigmatized by his condition, hypersensitive about it, yet prone to make cruelly ironic, self-deprecating allusions to it in his communication and interactions with others.<\/p>\n
The idea is that HT-L, who would naturally have been a horseman, athlete, dancer and lady’s man, instead withdraws into painting and a perceptive but passive observation of life, certain that he is repulsive, especially to women, as a man (and the film has ample actual confirmations of this conviction, with people finding him repulsive and saying so).<\/p>\n
HT-L falls in love with a prostitute who had sought his help, and he dares to get into a physical relationship with her only because he perceives that in her profession there is indifference to his condition. But she is indeed a prostitute, and it is never quite clear whether she is really just as repulsed by him as anyone else, or perhaps less so because she too feels a stigma. At any rate, she, ex officio, “betrays” him and his only carnal relationship (according to the movie — in real life HT-L had many prostitutes and mistresses too) ends, leaving him overwhelmed by despair and drink. But again his art, and his sardonic view of life draw him back from despair, if not from drink. He continues to frequent the Paris demi-monde and to paint it affectionately, unjudgmentally. He interacts with its denizens the same way — sympathetic, but unengaged. The implication is that the conviction has now been definitively confirmed that he cannot be loved physically, and that he will never again expose himself to the added torment of inspiring disgust by seeking love.<\/p>\n
His sense of being repulsive overflows only occasionally to his work or his words. It is mostly his body’s inability to inspire anything other than disgust that prevents him from daring to hope or to respond when another woman, far better born than the prostitute, and deeply responsive to both his art and his character, may or may not have fallen in love with him. She may love him, or she may just identify with him in a deeper way than the prostitute did; but she seeks a sign whether he will ever be able to allow himself to reciprocate or even acknowledge her feelings, and he is unable to allow himself to dare to show her — and perhaps even himself — that he loves her (although he does, having secretly followed her, jealously, exactly as he had the prostitute). So she — not a prostitute, but, like a prostitute, needing a provider — accepts to marry someone she does not love. As with the prostitute, his last-minute impulse to call her back comes too late.<\/p>\n
What is most universal about this film is that the sense of stigma that generates such a sense of being incapable of being loved, especially carnally, is not reserved for the physically disfigured. Or perhaps “appearance” is subtler than just bodily form.<\/p>\n
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\nNote added Jan 24 2010:<\/b> Since seeing Offenbach’s Comptes de Hoffmann, both Hoffmann and Kleinzach, come to mind — but perhaps these were all late 19th-century bohemian\/Parisian clich\u00e9s…<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A late-comer’s appreciation of John Huston’s 1952 Moulin Rouge, based on Pierre La Mure’s novel about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Although the French wikipedia states that HT-L’s contemporaries said he was not bitter or inhibited because of his hereditary deformity (dwarfism and disfigurement, exacerbated by a childhood accident; his parents were first cousins), but rather an … <\/p>\n