Moulin Rouge!

• The core tragic love-story structure is heavily echoed: young writer + vulnerable woman + love + illness + separation + death.
• The bohemian community of artists, writers, poverty, and romanticized Parisian artistic life carries over.
• Christian/Rodolfo and Satine/Mimì have clear parallels, particularly Christian as the young writer and Satine as the dying beloved.
• Luhrmann borrows the heightened melodrama, theatricality, emotional excess, and operatic sensibility.
• Love, poverty, illness, sacrifice, youth, artistic life, and death are central to both.

Moulin Rouge! takes the operatic romantic tragedy model and transforms it into a modern pop musical.

Baz Luhrmann actually called Orpheus the film's “primary myth.” In a later letter about the film, he explained that he and co-writer Craig Pearce started with the Orpheus myth and then placed it in 1890s Belle Époque Paris and the bohemian world of Montmartre.

• Christian mirrors Orpheus as a gifted writer and musician driven by love.
• Satine mirrors Eurydice as the beloved woman whose death cannot be prevented.
• Both stories portray an artist trying to overcome or escape the power of death.
• Both end with the lover losing his beloved, transforming love into tragedy.