Moulin Rouge (2001) - 56 mistakes

Continuity: After Harry Zidler first sees Christian and Satine kissing, when they stop kissing, Satine's lipstick switches from being smeared to perfectly done and bright red when she walks and when Zidler is talking to her about having to end the infatuation.

Revealing: There is a shot where the point of view of the camera is looking down at Christian and Telouse from the opening in his ceiling. You can see John Leguazmo's legs behind him and that he is clearly kneeling down.

Continuity: While Christian and Satine are singing the Come What May finale, you see Christian walking towards the stage to join Satine. Christian passes the conductor, yet when the camera angle changes, the conductor is nowhere to be seen.

Continuity: The scar on the Duke's bodyguard's face switches from one cheek to the other throughout the movie.

Continuity: When Satine is dancing with Christian in the first Moulin Rouge scene, her pink feather dress's straps are very thin. But when Chocolat sets her down backstage after she has fainted, her straps are much thicker and are more intricate. This is mentioned on the DVD - the later scene was filmed first, and changes had to be made to the dress in order for Nicole Kidman to dance around in it.

Continuity: When Christian and Satine finish singing the Elephant Love Medley, Satine leans in to kiss Christian. When she does this, she tilts her head to the left, but when they go to a wide shot, it shows her tilting to the right.

Continuity: Just before the end, Telouse is dressed as the Sitar and is shot up into the catwalk holding a bottle of wine. He wants to warn Christian about the assassin and starts to walk through the catwalk. There are times when he is holding onto the bottle and there are times when no bottle is present.

Continuity: When Satine goes to see Christian after the Duke almost rapes her, she has either no or very little lipstick on cause her lips are pink. But after about 2 or 3 camera shots, she has her red lipstick on again, which is also unsmeared unlike the rest of her makeup.

Deliberate "mistake": During the finale, the backround looks like a sunset and there is a big door in the back. Watch closely and all of a sudden from one camera angle to the next (it's right after the big puff of smoke), the background changes to an elaborate background of layers of hearts, the door is gone, and there are about 60 more extras onstage. During the DVD Baz explains that they filmed the scene with both backgrounds and it just to happened that the beginning was better with one and the end was better with the other, so they put the puff of smoke in there to distract the audience so that they wouldn't see the change.

Visible crew/equipment: During the The Pitch, a crew member is visible after they sing "elephant, Bohemians, Indians, and courtesans...". He can be seen wearing a green/gray baseball cap, pushing the bald man who is hanging on the chandelier.

Continuity: When Satine grabs the Duke's legs in the Red Room, she is on her knees and you can see she is not wearing any shoes for about 1 second in the frame. Then she stands up and is therefore about the same height as the Duke. But before and after this scene she is wearing high heels.

Continuity: When Satine and Christian suddenly appear on stage you see the two golden doors close behind them. In the next shot, however, the doors are open again and do not close until later in that scene.

Continuity: At the end of 'Come What May' during the play, in the shot where Toulouse is hanging from the piece of wood, he is supposed to fall off and grab a rope and swing. In the shot, however, he falls straight down, off the screen, and then he is magically back in the shot and swinging off a rope.

Continuity: When Toulouse remembers his line during the play, he jumps onto the wood to go down. In the shot, he lands on his side and is holding onto the rope and is fully on the piece of wood. In the next shot, however, he is hanging from the edge off of the wood.

Continuity: When Toulouse enters Christian's room at the beginning of the film the door knob is about shoulder height for him. When Christian yells at Toulouse later to go away as he exits the room the door handle is about hip level.

Continuity: In the scene where Satine meets the Duke for the first time in the elephant, Christian is hiding behind the table and Satine is trying to distract the Duke. After she does her 'dance', the Duke asks her if she wants some champagne. When she yells, she reaches out with her left hand. When she is shown again, she is reaching out with her right.

Continuity: Santine's hair is messed up after she gets done rolling all over the floor; but when she stands up and walks over to Christian, her hair is perfectly fixed.

Continuity: When Nicole Kidman is singing "Diamonds...etc" on stage, just after she coughs there is a shot of 'the maharaja' turning to look at 'the duke'. Then it cuts to a wide shot of the stage and 'the maharaja' is facing Kidman - check out his turban in the center of the screen at the bottom. It cuts back and forth like this for a few shots.

Visible crew/equipment: When Nini is doing the dance to Roxanne, you can see a very visible cameraman when one of the male dancers lifts her over his head. If played in slow motion, you can see that the spotlight even focuses on the cameraman for a split second.

Continuity: During the Elephant Love Medly, Satine and Christian are walking back into the Elephant. Before Christian walks into the Elephant, his hair is visibly messed up and hanging into his eyes. When he walks into the Elephant, his hair is combed back and perfect. Another shot later his hair is in his eyes again.

Continuity: At the beginning of the like a virgin dance number, there are 4 dancers spinning around the duke and Zidler. One of the 4 dancers has thick sideburns in one shot, then they disappear, then reappear, and so on.

Continuity: Zidler starts to sing "The show must go on" and walks between two workmen. One of them pulls a rope to lift himself up. He rises above his mate's head, but in the next shot he is at waist level lifting himself up.

Continuity: When Satine is rehearsing the end of the show in front of the Duke, Chocolat descends on a rope, but on later shots his position keeps changing from totally up to totally down.

Continuity: After Satine says, "It's lady's choice.", the Argentinian exhales a puff of smoke. A split second later, the angle changes and he is in a totally different position.

Continuity: From the beginning of the Red Room scene, until the end of "The Pitch," Christian's tie changes in a variety of ways he obviously didn't have time or opportunity to fix, considering all that hiding from the Duke. Christian's tie starts out straight, is removed by Satine during the "big boy" tumble, but later shows up again, perfectly tied during the "Your Song" dance on the roof. It disappears again after the dance on the roof ends, but mysteriously shows back up during different scenes in "The Pitch," untied, and flapping around his neck. No times listed, because its a running occurrence, on the DVD, watch closely from scenes 8-12.

Continuity: In the 'Come What May' sequence in the theater, in some shots, after Nini tells the Duke about Satine and Christian, the other dancers are sitting in chairs and there is a giant pile of chairs that the stage crew is setting up. But when the Duke says he doesn't like the ending, there are no chairs, no dancers, and no stage crew.

Continuity: In the scene where the Duke and Zidler are negotiating their contract, the background decorations change a few times. The DVD commentary mentions that the scene was shot in both Madrid and Sydney and to look for hair changes, but the statue behind the Duke's shoulder is noticably different depending on the shot. One good tip is to watch for the different camera angles showing that the cameras were not in the same place.

Continuity: When Satine is with the Duke on the bed, she tells him to get out. The side shot shows her pushing him out, but the behind shot shows her pushing him out again.

Continuity: When Christian asks Satine about the 'will the lovers meet at the citar player's humble abode scene' the Duke's and Christian's heads are very close together in one shot, but about a foot apart in the next.

Continuity: When the Duke's being healed of Chocolat's punch, in the close shots there's bits of hair loose to his right eyebrow (left side of the screen). In the long shots it disappears.

Continuity: Satine descends to sing "Diamonds" and she has a square hair-clip on the right side of her head. Seconds later it disappears.

Continuity: In the beginning, when Christian has come up with the lyrics "the hills are alive," watch the tango singer's hair changing all the time from long and messy to short and brushed.

Continuity: When Satine says, "It's lady's choice.", from a front view, the Argentinian is very close to the bearded man, but from a back shot they are farther away.

Continuity: When they are singing, "And they call them the diamond dogs." the black guy's hat is on, then off, and changed each time you see him in those few moments.

Continuity: When Nini says "This ending's stupid, why is she falling for the penniless writer, oops, I mean sitar player?" The very next shot shows the stage, and you can see Nini, and her friends (whom she was sitting with after she spoke with the duke) on the stage singing.

Continuity: During the performance of "Spectacular Spectacular", when Satine first comes up from beneath the stage, her left leg is posed outside her skirt. In the next far shot, her leg is inside the skirt and not visible. It then returns to outside the skirt.

Factual error: After Zidler tells Satine that she is dying, he is seen walking up a stairway past some sewing women. In an overview of the stairs, a stage light to the left has about a dozen or so frosted light bulbs in it. Frosted, tungsten light bulbs were not invented until the mid-to-late 1920s. Any electric light in 1900 would have had clear, carbon-filament bulbs. And no, those are not glass shades over the bulbs.

Continuity: In the final scene, when they are performing the play before the audience, watch as Satine makes her initial appearance and rises up out of the floor. In some shots, you can see her leg sticking out through the slit in her dress, in other shots, her leg is still inside her dress.

Continuity: During the "Like a Virgin" sequence, when the Duke is sitting on a couch, his hair changes between the shots: From loose to perfectly brushed and straight.

Continuity: The first time Satine faints, she is given something to sniff and wake up. The amount of sweat on her forehead and eyes changes between shots.

Continuity: When Satine is singing "One day I'll fly away", Christian climbs up the elephant and encounters her. He leans on a column with a red ball. The ball keeps moving between shots, even though Christian keeps still in the same position, watching Satine. Sometimes the ball is down, sometimes up, sometimes close to him.

Deliberate "mistake": When Satine and Christian are singing "The Elephant Love Medley" and Satine dismisses Christian singing "I'll drink all the time" and then heads down to the heart window of the Red Room. If you watch the chains attached to the elephant's head just after Satine passes under them and before Christian leaves they move as if being struck by something. The actors actually were on safety wires and Satine's hit the chains when she went in. They later edited out the wires so now the chains look as if they were hit by an invisible object.

Revealing: Throughout the movie, if you listen closely to Ewan when he whispers, you can hear that his accent switches from English to Scottish.

Continuity: During Satine's first number, Diamonds, when she is on the trapeze, her lipstick is a bright red. It changes to a dark pink and then back to red during the song and is finally pink when she has passed out.

Continuity: During the "Rhythm of the Night" dance sequence you see The Petite Princess singing on the bar in a hindu outfit behind the gnarly men. After that you see her in her can can skirt. Then any time you see the gnarly men she's back in the hindu outfit.

Continuity: During the scene where Satine and Zidler are together on the stand singing 'Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend', Satine takes off her right glove and shakes it in her right hand. In the next shot, it is her left glove and she has her right glove back on.

Visible crew/equipment: When Satine is singing 'One day I'll fly away,' she goes up the steps to the top of the elephant. If you look to the top windows of the building behind her, you can see a strange shape gliding past the lit windows from left to right. I'm not sure what it is, since it isn't the shape of a person and it looks like it's on a track. Then when Satine sings, 'Why live life from dream to dream?' the shape goes back from right to left, and at the last second, before it cuts to Christian, the lights go out. Now, I've seen the behind-the-scenes of footage of Moulin Rouge, and that scene was probably behind a blue screen so I haven't a clue what the shape is.

Continuity: Towards the end of the movie when the cast is singing the finale song and the Argentinian comes out he walks down the stairs twice.

Continuity: When Satine and Christian first kiss in the Elephant you can see Satine's hair is down on the side of her face. Then it is tucked back behind her ear a second later.

Continuity: When Christian knocks over the candle in the Red Room, the flame goes out and there is another shot of it out. Then suddenly there is a shot of the candle knocked over but still burning on the table and it's reflected in some of the silverware. Then the next shot of the table, the candle is suddenly out again.

Visible crew/equipment: A reflection in the camera lense can be seen.

Continuity: In the Can-Can dance scene, there is a brief shot of Nini Legs-In-The-Air sitting down and spreading her legs as wide apart as they will go. She is dressed entirely in black. The shot changes immediately to the Can-Can dancers all lined up, with Nini standing in the middle wearing a yellow dress. She continues to wear this outfit for the rest of the scene.

Continuity: In the end of "Your Song" when Satine and Christian return to the Elephant Room, Satine puts her right arm around Christian's neck. Shots from Satine's right side reveal her right forearm (you can see her elbow), but shots from her left side show that her sleeve cover the entire forearm, and uncover it when she doesn't put her arm in Christian's neck anymore (touch his shoulder).

Continuity: When Christian and Satine are up on the elephant and she is about to leave, you see him put his hand on the pole. Then it cuts to another shot and you see him put his hand on it again in a different way.

Continuity: When Harry Zidler tells everyone at the Moulin to Hunkadoola away, he changes the sign below him to "Hunkadoola". However when the camera shot changes to wide the sign reads "Moulin Rouge" instead.

Continuity: During the end of One Day I'll Fly Away, Satine intended to sit on top of the elephant room. When she was still standing, part of her hair was in front of her left shoulder. However when she sat and sang "Fly, fly, away" (the next shot) none of her hair was in front of the shoulder.