I’m in a life group for single women, ages 18-25, where we eat dinner and watch a movie and then discuss the movie along with biblical themes. (Since I’m neither single nor under 25, you might have guessed that I’m the hostess.) This week we watched one of my favorite romances. So, as opposed to my previous movie post, I’ll tell you what this one’s called, so you can A) judge me for hosting a bible study on it, or B) go watch it yourself.
Here’s what “Dinner & A Movie: Chick Flicks 2” from Group Publishing, our curriculum, says about the flick in question, Moulin Rouge:
“While they may or may not have known it, the creators of Moulin Rouge! offer us a picture of Christlike love. Our young hero, Christian, ventures into a sinful and lost world in search of his love. Instead of being taken up by that lost world, he brings his own purity of heart into it – rescuing his beloved Satine from the grips of a desperate and sinful life. It recalls the biblical story of Hosea and Gomer as well as Christ’s own time on earth.”
I don’t write movie reviews anymore, but let me tell you about a few of my favorite scenes: Satine one minute sings about her dream of a new life – “someday I’ll fly away/leave all this to yesterday” – and the next acknowledges the hopelessness of such a dream – “why live life from dream to dream/and dread the day when dreaming ends?” She at once has both hope and no hope; she yearns for change, but thinks she will never be free, and knows what even a small measure of freedom will cost her. She is trapped by her past and by her own view of her self-worth. As she later shouts to her father figure/pimp, “My whole life you made me believe I was only worth what someone would pay for me.” But now she has real hope for the first time: “Christian loves me, and we’re going away…”
Even after Christian’s love for her changes her life, she still falls back into her old patterns – she does the wrong things for the right reasons. This is what reminds me of our relationship with God. Not only does he come right down into whatever mess we’re in and love us in the middle of it – giving us true freedom, hope and love – he remains faithful to us when we screw it up and push him away. 2 Timothy 2:13 says, “[Even] if we are unfaithful, He remains faithful.”
Just like the aforementioned Gomar, wife to the prophet Hosea. Gomar wasn’t a nice, sweet hooker like Satine or Vivianne (Pretty Woman) who fell into the trap of prostitution to survive. She was kinda nasty. Her biblical portrait is not pretty. And even after Hosea marries her, rescuing her from a life of misery, she falls back into the trap. She leaves her husband, sells her body and winds up a slave. And what does Hosea do? What the Lord advises: “Go and love your wife again.” So Hosea writes in chapter 3 of his self-titled book, “So I bought her back.” The study section of my bible says this: “No matter how low we sink, God is willing to buy us back – to redeem us – to lift us up again.”
Now that’s something worth living for. In Jeremiah 31:3, God says: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; with unfailing love I have drawn you to myself.” As Moulin Rouge states many times, “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”
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