Content area
Full Text
In his new, extravagant version of 'Romeo & Juliet', Baz Lurhmann makes the story a visceral epic. He exploits camp, cars and guns to turn Shakespeare into cinema - and his words into real movie dialogue. By José Arroyo
William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet is a kiss-kiss bang-bang movie. It's got action, spectacle and romance and it aims to entertain. Unlike other movies of Shakespeare's plays - the ones we all get bored by on school trips to the cinema - Romeo & Juliet doesn't salaam to Shake speare's language. The words are all there, as glorious as always, but they are not the raison d'être of the film. If most other Shakespeare films nullify the expressive power of mise en scène by subordinating it, in the service of the language, the Australian director Baz Luhrmann (who made the high-camp dance film Strictly Ballroom) elevates Shakespeare cinematically. He makes Shakespeare's work relevant the way it rarely has been in films, by treating his words merely as great dialogue. Romeo & Juliet is a moving picture. The dialogue is performed and heard as much in and through the exhilarating movement of striking images, and it is in and through motion that the film moves its audience emotionally.
Romeo & Juliet is set in a 'constructed' world, one that is different enough from a 'real' one to allow for different ways of being and knowing, but with enough similarities to permit understanding. It is a device presently popular across a variety of cultural forms. In comic books, whenever writers want to experiment with risky storylines, they place their characters in a 'parallel universe' (DC Comic Books has a whole Earth II where characters introduced in the 40s are older and have led different lives than the Superman or Wonder Woman of 'our' world). Science fiction often constructs new worlds in which to set contemporary dilemmas, and fantasy novels brew epic potions of topical villainy by combining modern characterisation with mediaeval social structures, chivalry, magic, mythological monsters and, sometimes, futuristic technology. In a broader sense, every movie could be said to construct its own world (that we accept the city in which Casablanca is set as standing in for the real place doesn't mean it's anything remotely...