I just watched Moulin Rouge and can I just say that it is one of the worst films I have ever seen. Although I am surprised that we do not see more Hollywood films based on the concept of “all we need is love” I am still shocked when they rely on the concept of love to hide the obvious flaws of the main characters.
Okay, a bit of background: the Good Guy, Christian, is in love with the Heroine, Satine. The bad guy, The Duke is also in love with her. Towards the end of the film we see that Satine pretends to not love Christian (to stop him getting killed) and Christian has to bear the heartbreak of a girl who pretended to love him. We feel a massive amount of sorrow for Christian, who is under the impression that Satine was never in love with him, and was just toying with him. What a horrible thing to feel – that a girl only pretended to be in love with him.
Hello? Did we miss something here? The same fucking thing happened to the Duke earlier in the film. He was in love with Satine and she pretended to be in love with him back so that they could steal his money. And suddenly he’s the bad guy? Why?
Yes, he did try to buy her instead of falling in love that traditional way (through song apparently) but then again she is a whore, and she was there to be bought. And besides, even though she was completely in love with Christian, and could never go through with sleeping with The Duke, she still had no problems whatsoever with taking his money.
I guess it is all to do with what traits the characters posses. We all knew that The Duke was evil as soon as we realised he was rich and ugly. Christian, on the other hand, had the virtues of being talented and good looking, signifying to us straight away that he is the hero that can do no wrong.