Moulin Rouge!

This song opens the frame of recollection, placing the film's final insight in its very first scene. What seems a riddle at first becomes the conclusion by the end.

• The original was written in the 1940s by eden ahbez and made famous by Nat King Cole. As the film begins, Toulouse-Lautrec draws the song out in a murmur, and as it ends, Christian sings it again. The same song wraps around the beginning and the end in a bookend structure.
• The first soundtrack album opens with David Bowie's “Nature Boy” and closes with another Bowie version made with Massive Attack. Craig Armstrong's history of working with Massive Attack is tied to this choice.
• Cat Stevens's “Father and Son” was originally meant to fill this spot, but permission could not be obtained, so this song took its place. As a result, the film opens not with a story of father and son but with a revelation about love.
• A melody leaning toward the minor circles around a short phrase, repeating it, and sounds like the voice of someone telling an old tale.

This song captures the uproar of the moment you step into the Moulin Rouge. In the film, it flows inside “Zidler's Rap,” mixed in with other songs.

• The original was written by Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan and made famous in the 1970s by LaBelle. With its French refrain, it was a natural fit for transplanting to a Paris cabaret.
• The soundtrack version was shared among Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mya and Pink. It reached No. 1 on the US Billboard singles chart and won the Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, so that the song became known even before the film.
• In the film's scene, it is woven together all at once with songs by Nirvana and Fatboy Slim and a cancan rhythm. The mash-up approach, layering different songs into one, plunges the audience in a single stroke into the din of a fin-de-siècle cabaret.
• Heavy electronic beats, brass and a succession of voices stepping forward one after another sound like the cries of a barker calling in customers.

In this song, a meeting born of a mistake turns into true feeling. Its melody then serves throughout the film as the theme of the two lovers' love.

• This is a song Elton John and Bernie Taupin released in 1970. Its manner, a poet unable to find grand words who shyly bares his heart, fits exactly the situation of Christian, who sets out to read a poem and ends up singing instead.
• Ewan McGregor sang it himself. As the song, begun quietly, gradually swells, the moon rises over the rooftops of Paris, and a fantastical scene follows in which the moon sings in operatic style. Tenor Alessandro Safina joined him on the soundtrack version.
• Armstrong carried this melody into the orchestra and made it the love theme. The technique of using a particular melody to signify a character or an emotion is called a leitmotif. You can hear it at work in two instrumental versions on the second soundtrack album, one for the rehearsal scene and one for after the storm.
• The same melody sounds like excitement in the first confession and like loss after the parting. The melody stays the same, but its meaning changes with the scene.

In this scene Christian tries to win over Satine, who does not believe in love. Fragments of other people's love songs become the dialogue between them.

• Love songs by the Beatles, Kiss, Phil Collins, U2, David Bowie, Dolly Parton and others are cut short and stitched together. No single song runs long; each breaks off after a line or two and passes to the next.
• It takes the form of an argument in which Christian offers a line from a love song and Satine parries with another. The point of the scene is how this back-and-forth gradually turns into a duet the two sing together.
• With every fragment, the audience recalls the original song, and the film exploits precisely that familiarity. This is where the film's idea comes through most clearly: even someone speaking of love for the first time has no choice but to borrow words someone else said first.
• In the latter part, as the music swells and soars into the high register, the stage atop the elephant room seems to float up into the sky.

This is where jealousy reaches its peak. The tango stage and the hours of Satine and Christian cut across one another and tighten into one.

• The Police's “Roxanne” is layered with a tango melody by the Argentine composer Mariano Mores. A British rock band's song and a South American dance are bound together by a single emotion, jealousy.
• In the opening, which begins as though Jacek Koman's Argentinian were simply speaking, the clipped, staccato rhythm of the tango builds little by little. At first crouched low, the rhythm grows steadily faster and rougher.
• As the cross-cutting shifts back and forth between scenes, the music thickens layer by layer. A texture of several vocal lines moving at once gathers the three characters' crossed timelines into a single sound.
• The soundtrack version adds the voice of José Feliciano. Where the strings scrape sharply, the characters sound as if their nerves are about to snap.

This is the scene in which Satine, holding on to what she has hidden, resolves to keep the show going. For the first time, the glittering cabaret song takes on the weight of tragedy.

• Queen released the song on their 1991 album “Innuendo.” Here the original's rock scoring is carried over into a large orchestra and an operatic chorus, creating a mood that is majestic yet suffocating.
• Jim Broadbent and Nicole Kidman sing it together. Within a single song, Zidler's words urging Satine on for the sake of the show interlock with Satine's words holding down her own heart.
• It is built on the same short chord progression, stubbornly repeated, with the volume and pitch pushed higher toward the end. The feeling of the stage swallowing a person whole comes from this repetition.
• It did not appear on the first soundtrack album; it was included, exactly as heard in the film, on the second, released after the film's success.

The song that was the secret signal of the rehearsal room returns as a reprise on the opening-night stage. It is the moment when the song of the play within the play becomes a confession in real life.

• This is the film's only original song. David Baerwald had written it for “Romeo + Juliet,” where it went unused, and so it was ineligible for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
• It first appears as a quiet duet exchanged between the two. Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor sang it themselves, and the way their two voices begin apart and merge into a single melody turns a promise of love into sound.
• The reprise, a song heard earlier sung once more, is the device of the climax. The same melody that was a whisper in the rehearsal room becomes, before the audience, a vast chorus layered with the songs of other characters.
• In the 2019 Broadway stage version, too, this song remained the lovers' central number. The stage version rebuilt the song list, adding a host of pop songs released after the film, and won the 2021 Tony Award for Best Musical.