Writer-director Baz Luhrmann, (Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet), has created a love story, but it is not the love between a man and woman that sparks the fires of the Moulin Rouge. It is the relationship between man and a fairy, La Fee Verte, the famed green fairy of Absinthe, personified in the film by Australian pop star Kylie Minogue.

The show begins with the raising of a stage curtain, a storytelling device that automatically pulls the audience into a world beyond reality. The scene onto which the curtain raises is that of the great impressionist painter, Toulouse-Lautrec, (portrayed in the film by a stunningly over-the-top John Leguizamo). Singing from a balcony that overlooks the Moulin Rouge, Lautrec’s image is balanced by the faint outline of a La Fee Verte advertisement in the screen’s upper right. He sings to the Green Fairy of a “strange and lonely boy,” lyrics which describe himself as much as the film’s hero, a writer named Christian, portrayed by a brooding yet sultry Ewan McGregor.

The camera zooms in on Christian’s garret, a room above the Moulin Rouge the young writer has rented for a year to experience the promise of Bohemian Paris. In this opening scene Christian tastes his first Absinthe, a moment at which he, along with the audience, is propelled into a hyper-reality of hideous excess.

The result is a pulsating, two-hour music video slashed with bold color, relentless movement and layers of sexual tension and innuendo. What is depicted is not the Moulin Rouge of reality, but a boyish fantasy, complete with a luscious seductress, Satine, embodied by an exhibitionist Nicole Kidman. (It is rumored that during the rehearsal period, Luhrmann threw lavish Absinthe parties to help get the cast into the “spirit” of the times.)

And while the story Christian weaves is one of the power of love, the story is not real, not even within the world of the film. At the film's end, Christian is back in his garret after experiencing the greatest love affair anyone could ever hope to experience. It becomes clear that what has just unfolded is only a dream of a storyteller, one whose tale is heavily influenced by the observations of the bordello outside his window, but is more heavily influenced by the empty Absinthe and Champagne bottles littering the desk and floor of his abode.

As with all Luhrmann films, Moulin Rouge is an assault on the senses. But it is so heavily textured with messages and meanings that the viewer wishing for more than simple entertainment gains little more than a pulsing headache upon the first viewing. To truly appreciate Luhrmann’s vision takes two or more screenings, but who would return after viewing what is at its best a vicious attack to the senses?

And although Luhrmann’s great skill for spectacle and storytelling make him at once admired and hated, no one amongst the culinary world could deny Moulin Rouge’s contribution to gastronomy. For there is one message every audience member will carry away from the theatre. But it is not the impact of truth or beauty Luhrmann’s film hammers at its viewers.Truth and beauty become lost among the camera’s image distortion and the story’s many lies. What Luhrmann’s garish characterization of La Belle Epoch clearly sends forth is the gastronomic truth of the Bohemian life: Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.