Baz Luhrmann’s El Tango de Roxanne sequence is, by no exaggeration, the pinnacle of what a musical number can achieve. If Moulin Rouge! is a drug-fueled euphoria of a jukebox musical up to that point in the film, then Roxanne is a shot of adrenaline into my eyeballs as a dozen flaming violins ricochet at my periphery while Ewan McGregor’s guttural cries slice into my soul. Gone is the film’s caricatural hyper-romanticism (though it comes back later), Roxanne is all about this frantic, murderous jealousy; and the raw emotions contained are so palpable that they cannot be sung — they can only be screamed. It’s genius because this number legitimises and deepens the eros between Christian and Satine that was fairly satirical thus far, and dramatises the essential conflict of the narrative such that it sets the stage for an eventual tragedy.
This number is roughly made up of three parts: 1) the vertigo-inducing tango between the Argentinean and Nini; 2) Satine and the Duke’s uneasy confrontation; and 3) Christian’s painful oscillation between fiction and reality. “His eyes upon your face, his hand upon your hand, his lips caress your skin — it’s more than I can stand!” Christian doesn’t sound any different from the Duke here: the two men viewing Satine as both an object of desire and an active breaker of hearts, but in truth she was manipulated into this situation at the behest of another man, Zidler. No one who claimed to care for her thought to rescue her from the tower, especially when she places herself in jeopardy by being faithful to Christian and refuses the Duke’s advance. “You’re free to leave me but just don’t deceive me” — no, she’s not and she didn’t: Satine saw Christian from afar and thought of their promise to each other come what may; Christian saw Satine from afar and did nothing. He went home and wallowed in narcissistic anguish. While the Duke never tried to earn Satine’s love and Christian did, the latter betrayed her love with vile, bitter jealousy, and that’s the knockout punch that nearly killed her.
To tell the pivotal turn of the story, we are taken on a high speed merry-go-round of a poisonous love affair through some truly nauseating, near-violent editing, designed for the audience to get lost in the same passion that consumed the characters. Watching Moulin Rouge! is more a narcosis than a feast for the senses, and Baz Luhrmann, bless him, is an unrelenting arsonist, setting figurative fire to the camera, the musical instruments and his cast. The gift of Ewan McGregor, is a voice that is perfectly in tune but at the same time always on the precipice of cracking. Where he lacks the finesse of a professional vocalist, he makes up with an idiosyncratic timbre of pure, earth-shattering anguish. You don’t have to look at the screen to know he’s full-on weeping. Whichever brilliant musician on solo violin for Roxanne, they played as if their hands are trembling out of agony, like there’s a physical spasm caused by overwhelming emotional torment. The glissandos and trills set the music ablaze, and its rhythm is appropriately in tandem with the beguiling sounds of heels, fabrics and bodies slammed together. Meanwhile, the camera operates as a voyeur: as Christian crosses the threshold into the courtyard of the Moulin Rouge, the lens strip away all layers of metatextuality until it’s just the deepest, darkest demons of our protagonist.
The legacy of El Tango de Roxanne is perhaps best represented by decorated ice-skating duo Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir at the 2018 Winter Olympics. Their gold medal-worthy routine, set to Roxanne, is one of humanity’s most spectacular display of kinship, compatibility, and what it means to be two halves of a whole. Through art — be it films or dances on ice — we are more than capable of externalising the depths of our passions and push them towards a limit, until we realise there is actually none. Some things, like a love so strong that cannot be contained, deserves an unapologetic, extravagant, maximalist showcase. Baz knows it, and so does Ewan and Nicole, and Tessa and Scott.
