As Valentine’s Day doth approacheth, I take a look at the enduring classic, as reimagined by Australian director Baz Luhrmann.
I bloody HATED Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet when I first saw it at the cinema in 1996. I felt that transposing the Shakespeare classic to Venice Beach and bringing in nineties slackers in Hawaiian shirts and rich kids in designer jeans was gimmicky, pandering to the “yoot” and a bit grating. I was wrong, I think, in retrospect. It grew on me.
With time, I learned to love the grit and high- camp juxtaposition. The two leads had an innocence, vitality and spontaneity that was incredibly well matched. It’s thirty years old, but like the troubled characters, it will never age. It had style, queer supporting characters, humour, simmering passion and, in Claire Danes, the perfect Juliet. The fish tank scene when they first see each other, soundtracked by Des’ree’s beautiful ‘Kissing You’ is visual poetry.
Leonardo Di Caprio is insufferably smug these days, and resembles a less gifted Orson Welles, and Claire Danes just seems to be rather coasting it, in spite of good film work like the underrated Igby Goes Down alongside a young Kieran Culkin. But this iconic film has a soft spot in my heart, and I can appreciate how it changed the game for Shakespeare adaptations forever. I was wrong all those years ago.
Hit The North 