The first of these are Mercutio (Harold Perrineau) & Tybalt (John Leguizamo) who capture the energy of the familial war and the melodrama and physicality of the performance brilliantly. Of course, however it looks and feels without the performances working it would be for naught, but there are three sets of characters who capture the mood and the language superbly.
So, while the references to other Shakespearean things, such as The Globe pool hall, may feel a little crudely shoehorned in, the naming of the guns as longsword, rapier and such fits very nicely and adds a strange kinds of authenticity, while everything else feels heightened in such a way as to match the now heightened feeling language. The design of all of this is excellent and it really does feel like every single thing we see on screen has been considered and is there for a reason, no matter how brief it may be.
This chaos though is, somewhat oxymoronically, an excellently balanced one where it is clear throughout what is going on as we zip from scene to scene and the basics of the story are laid out. While it wouldn’t surprise me if it doesn’t work for everyone I’m happy to report that, for me, it more than holds up and, in fact, I probably found even more to enjoy in it now than I did in the past.Īfter a prologue that drops you, with barely a pause for breath, into Luhrmann’s viscerally cinematographic world, where the feuding families are represented in the style of technicolour street gangs, we meet our heroes who, for the film’s first half at least, are a beacon of calm in a world of chaos. Playing somewhat fast and loose with the text and throwing us headlong into a version of Verona that seemed to exist somewhere between the Los Angeles of the 90s and a less specific Latin American locale (it seems it was filmed in Mexico City in fact), I wondered if it would still appear as impressive re-watching now as it did then. It wasn’t much later I did see it as my interest in both theatre in general and Shakespeare more specifically grew and I was enraptured from the off. Back in the mid-90s, when Baz Luhrmann’s take on William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (as the movie was rather specifically titled) was released and I was in the midst of my teenage years, it was inescapable - from the soundtrack to the arrival of new teen heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio the film was everywhere whether you had seen it or not and, at the time, I hadn’t.
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