10 Best Musical Numbers In Film
2. Roxanne - Moulin Rouge!
Baz Luhrmann is a unique director. Whatever you say about his body of work, he is extremely ambitious with the medium of film. From his fascinating (if cripplingly misguided) Romeo + Juliet to his similarly perplexing The Great Gatsby, nearly every Baz Luhrmann film feels like a pastiche of manic music videos, often with mixed results. The only time his madcap approach really clicked with the material is his 2000 opus Moulin Rouge!
As a piece of storytelling, Moulin Rouge! is melodramatic, tonally inconsistent, and completely lacking in 3-dimensional characters. But as a musical experience, it is unlike any other.
And the sequence that perfectly captures why it resonates with people is the gut-wrenching "Roxanne", a dance sequence/montage toward the end of the second act. In this sequence, Satine (Nicole Kidman) attempts to seduce the evil Duke while her lover Christian (Ewan McGregor) watches a perfectly timed tango about infidelity and trust. And then... drama happens.
As Satine's meeting with the duke transforms from a dinner to an assault, Christian realizes that he cannot live with this arrangement. The pacing, editing, and intensity of the choreography increases in tempo, perfectly matching the drama of the scene.
Among the best edited musical numbers ever put to film, the frantic pace translates the choreography and emotion into something more than images - they transform it into raw emotion.