The musical, that grand old film form, had been dormant for a couple of decades when Baz Luhrmann, rather than just reviving the musical, attached it to the defibrillator of his wild imagination. In this mash-up of 42nd Street and Camille, the nightclub chanteuse played by Nicole Kidman evokes Marilyn and Madonna as she swings above the crowd warbling “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Ewan McGregor, as the poor writer who falls for the courtesan, is a nouveau Gene Kelly — a hunky Joe with a radiant smile, haunting the Left Bank like An American in Paris, twirling an umbrella a la Singin’ in the Rain. A sultry chorus line coos, “Moulin Rouge-ez avec moi ce soir?” and performs a tantric cancan. An all-out tribute to India’s Bollywood musical — a kind of “Springtime for Hindu” — has enough eye candy to give the viewer diabetes. Mixing the romantic and the grotesque, the songs of MGM and MTV, and two stars at the peak of their appeal, Luhrmann created a rhapsody in red, a musical that is both retro and now-tro.
The end of the decade has brought a spate of films about mourning: The Messenger, Brothers, The Lovely Bones, even Pixar’s Up — and Pedro Almodóvar’s own Broken Embraces, in which a film director still loves his leading lady 15 years after her death. But the Spanish auteur’s definitive essay on grief, and the love that feeds it, is in this liebestod drama. Two women, the bullfighter Lydia and the dancer Alicia, lie in comas in a Madrid hospital. Two men, Lydia’s lover Marco and Benigno, Alicia’s nurse, sit in abject, adoring vigil, expressing their love by keeping them clean or just conversing. You could call this the purest, most selfless form of love, or say that each man can idealize his woman now that she has been petrified into her own icon; he can talk to her because she can’t talk back. Effortlessly engrossing, never depressing, the film has heartbreak, redemption and what might be called statuary rape, plus a hilarious mid-movie explanation of the reproductive process. Talk to Her is the most satisfying movie this decade from the world’s most vital filmmaker.
In light of the Material Girl performing at Super Bowl XLVI, TIME takes a look at her life and career, both of which have been lived firmly in the public eye.
