All of the professional media to which I have access panned PAR1S 36, ostensibly because it was not as glitzy as director Baz Luhrmann's 2001 musical, MOULIN ROUGE! (More likely these critics were too lazy to read subtitles, especially during a musical.) A more apt comparison would pair PAR1S 36 with the 1999 Tim Robbins musical, CRADLE WILL ROCK. After all, both movies feature the development of a production during the story (from which the movies take their titles), both stories are set in the 1930s, and both feature large casts of theater socialists fighting against a few powerful fascists (which, in the case of CRADLE WILL ROCK, included a young Nelson Rockefeller personally taking a sledgehammer to a Diego Rivera mural in the newly-finished Rockefeller Center, circa 1933). Though I rated CRADLE WILL ROCK and MOULIN ROUGE with "10's," as far as musicals go, I think PAR1S 36 is involving enough to merit a solid "8" rating.
Review of Faubourg 36
