Kiss kiss bang bang: Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet

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 Shakespeare’s language. The words are all there, as glorious as always, but they are not the raison d’etre 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 like Casablanca). In the narrower sense I am using here, the convention of a constructed world has traditionally been associated only with particular genres: sci-fi, fantasy, horror and – to a different degree – the musical. But it is arguably now a dominant device, not only in a great deal of action/spectacle cinema, but also in such art fare as Orlando or Swoon.

Much of Romeo + Juliet was filmed in Mexico City, and the topography of that millennial urban nightmare is a key component of the film’s look. Verona is depicted as a massive industrial sprawl. At the centre of the city, a gigantic icon of Christ, arms outstretched, ineffectually looms over its inhabitants. Skyscrapers indicate that the Montagues and the Capulets are rich and warring corporate owners. But the skyscrapers are so rickety, dusty and old that they indicate a crumbling social structure. The city is close to sunny beaches and open skies. Its citizens sport rich clothes, fast cars and flash guns. But the city these citizens move in, its streets, buildings and institutions, are all in decay. The clothes mark caste while cars and guns may be mobilised to sudden and deadly consequence. The colour schemes change through the movie, but such bright pinks, blues and oranges are rarely to be found in nature. Verona’s Prince, although powerful, is ineffectual against the anarchic gang violence that is the city’s modus operandi. The way Verona is visualised evokes violent delights as well as violent ends. Pictorially it emphasises the ritual performance of ancient hates that is one of the film’s themes.

The film’s creation of this imaginary world, one like ours but different, allows us to recognise the actions depicted. We’ve seen that type of gang violence in news reports from Los Angeles, and the film borrows its iconography from LA gang culture (one gang member has the word “Montague” tattooed on his scalp). Yet this imaginary construction also renders understandable a world where filial duty, religious devotion, family honour and the institution of marriage have an importance that they do not in ours. In other words, such a construction contributes not only a visual setting for the film’s action, but also sets the dramatic terms for that action and therefore the conceptual schema for the audience’s understanding. Constructing a world which combines the real with the imagined, the past with the present, results in a depiction of a sense of time and space which is quasi-mythic.

Fredric Jameson has argued that this is typical of the dehistoricising effects of post-modern culture. But one could counter-argue that what he calls dehistoricising can be a means of making past conventions of storytelling understandable in the present context. The construction of mythic time and place in Romeo + Juliet, a no-time that is all time, and a no-place that stands for anyplace, is built bit by bit out of previous, inherited modes of telling, showing and understanding. These operate allegorically, and involve the viewer in sophisticated strategies of interpretation. So we are required to decipher what this constructed world stands for and how it comments on our own.

Romeo + Juliet is complex but also direct, pleasurable and easily accessible. The story is framed by a television news report. The television slowly materialises from a dark screen until it takes over the frame. A Black news-reader with the faux-friendly attitude, regulation hairdo, and style of announcing so typical of American television begins to tell us about “the two households, both alike in dignity”. The camera then cuts away from the news-reader, as we get to the report itself. As the voice-over continues to tell us how “civil war makes civil hands unclean”, we get a tabloid television montage of quickly edited images of chaos: some from a helicopter, some out of focus, some zooms and quick wipes. The end of the film will reverse this process and the television news-reader will fade to black as we are told that there “never was a story of more woe/Than this of Juliet and her Romeo”.

The brawl at the beginning of the play, which ends with the threat of a duel between Benvolio and Tybalt is filmed at a hysterical pitch. The audience seems to be assaulted by every cinematic trick in the book: impossible point-of-view shots (a huge close-up of Tybalt’s silver-heeled boots); quick cutting of pans, zooms, wipes. The scene culminates in the most characteristic device in the contemporary action/spectacle genre: the moment when something potentially destructive, moving at great speed, is shown in slow motion, to evoke the beauty of anticipating the horror to come. Here, that moment is when Tybalt draws his weapon on Benvolio.

The frenzy of this first scene is so viscerally exciting that the language gets lost in the action. The intent is probably strategic: to announce that Romeo + Juliet will be a Shakespeare film like no other. However, one is grateful that this kind of loss is not compounded. How the language gets performed – by the director, cinematographer and other film-makers as well as the actors – is still the major attraction in seeing a Shakespeare film. Fortunately, from then on, no matter how action-packed or how excitingly filmed the scene is, the speeches will be heard.

We are introduced to Romeo via a helicopter shot in a setting that conveys his state of mind. Initially we just see something that looks like a Victorian monument with a hole apparently blasted through it. The sun is coming up over a new day, over the near-apocalypse of the past. When we get to Romeo, the camera comes to rest, as he sighingly foreshadows what will happen – the brawling love, the loving hate. When Romeo tells us that “Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs” and a “madness most discreet”, the camera is in close-up. This alternation – between filming public scenes as action-packed and quick-moving, and slowing down the pace and moving the camera closer when the protagonists are expressing emotion in private – is characteristic of the film; plot is filmed intensely with a complex array of film devices; the intense emotions of Shakespeare’s characters are filmed quietly and more simply.

In this version of Romeo + Juliet, the Prince is something akin to a Chief of Police, Mercutio is a Black drag queen, the Montagues are white while the Capulets are Hispanic. This amounts to more than just the attribution of ethnic or racial characteristics to characters: it helps to restore to Shakespeare’s filmed work a polyphony that has been eroded through years of respect. Having Harold Perrineau depict Mercutio as a drag queen is a delight, if not too much of a surprise: a certain bawdiness is one of the pleasures of Shakespeare, and previous film interpretations (including John Barrymore in George Cukor’s 1936 version) have tended towards camp. Even a Black Mercutio will not seem strange: we’ve become used to blind casting in Shakespeare (good though Denzel Washington was in Kenneth Branagh’s version, he was still Much Ado About Nothing). 

But what will (I think) surprise is Perrineau’s recognisably Black-American inflection; and that Vondie Curtis-Hall speaks the Prince role in the usual received pronunciation and declamatory style expected of Shakespearean princes, while Paul Sorvino as Fulgencio Capulet and John Leguizamo as Tybalt speak with a Hispanic accent. The language is just as poetic; and in the sense that it adds a racial and ethnic dimension to the characterisation, arguably richer, more relevant to contemporary culture. And it is undoubtedly more ‘realistic’ and (perhaps because of that) more accessible. The vocal performances here aren’t as attention grabbing or as theatrical as the vocally complex and rich declamatory style usually associated with Olivier (though they derive from a great British theatrical tradition): yet I find that it’s a style that works beautifully in this film.

The film’s attribution of ethnicity puts an interesting slant on how the film depicts gender. As in West Side Story, Romeo’s side is white, while Juliet’s is Hispanic. This device attaches to Shakespeare’s characters certain modern stereotypes, which make them more understandable. Tybalt, for example, is as sleek and agile as a puma. He wears Cuban heels, tight pants, a Matador jacket and a pencil-thin moustache. Every movement he makes has the elegance and force of a flamenco gesture. His pride, temper and the importance he attaches to family honour are far more understandable to present-day viewers as Hispanic stereotypes than as the values of a Renaissance nobleman. Likewise, Juliet’s refusal of her father’s becomes more transgressive when read through her ethnicity.

The way the film racialises the family is intriguing. It is the woman’s family which tends to be depicted as of a ‘minority’, thus doubly disempowering her. Within her family context here, Juliet has very limited power over her actions and her future – not only because she’s a young girl, but because she’s a Hispanic young girl. Romeo’s love is thus also a promise of integration, one which gets fulfilled after their death when the two families reconcile at the end. Moreover, as in West Side Story, which has Natalie Wood as Maria, whose family is clearly marked as ethnically Other, the heroine is played by a ‘white’ actress. Thus while Paul Sorvino can personify ethnicity as Capulet, Claire Danes as Juliet doesn’t even use the accent. Her ethnicity is a kind of drag impersonation imposed on her character by genealogy. This adds a certain erotic frisson to the relationship while not burdening the love story with any extra social repercussions inherent in an inter-racial romance.

Perhaps Romeo + Juliet’s greatest success is in its depiction of the love story. The film really captures the romance of adolescent love: sometimes flighty but also exaggeratedly obsessive, intense and secret, frightfully dangerous and touchingly pure. When Romeo goes to the party where he will meet Juliet, he takes some drugs and all of a sudden the black sky is full of red fireworks. Something explosive is about to happen. When he does meet Juliet, everything quietens down. He sees her eye through white coral in a fish tank. We see both of them in close-up staring at each other as tropical fish in brightly beautiful colours glide over their faces. Even as they are separated by the tank, their reflections are already side by side. The private moments of Romeo and Juliet are always shown as enclosed or submerged. In the balcony scene, they kiss under water. After they are married and he sneaks into her bedroom, we see them under a sheet. The morning after, we see them through an overhead shot that finds them grounded on the bed, their adolescent bodies unprotected even by a sheet, much less from the dangers that lie ahead.

Romeo + Juliet works on many levels, but it could all have fallen apart with the wrong casting. Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes not only act the parts well but, more importantly (an importance we can glean from the success of the rather badly acted Zeffirelli version in ‘68), they look like adolescents. Danes brings a quiet resolution to her part, a maturity and pragmatism evoked by her face and figure as much as by her acting, while still looking like an adolescent. DiCaprio is skinny and gangly, seemingly all arms and legs. His walk, somewhat pigeon-toed, makes him seem very vulnerable. This version of the film places rather more onus on Romeo than on Juliet. He is the one who bears the brunt of feeling: it’s his face in close-up most of the time indicating how he wants, longs, feels and sometimes, eyes hidden by tears, suffers. His performance is all raw emotion. When he’s in exile in Mantua, it’s not just the flat barren desert of red earth and regulation trailers that speak his desolation, but the way he moves. When he hears of Juliet’s death it’s not just that the camera lifts up suddenly to crush him that expresses his grief, but the way he falls on his pigeon-toed heels. It’s a superb performance.

Romeo + Juliet draws on many genres. We can detect elements from Rebel Without a Cause. The Dirty Harry films are evoked, as are Fellini and Busby Berkeley. But they are all brought together through a camp aesthetic pitched at a melodramatic level. In traditional melodrama, effect tends to be in excess of cause. A one-night stand, a missed encounter or a simple misunderstanding could lead to a lifetime of tragedy. Romeo and Juliet fall in love instantly; they promise to marry one another and because of this (and several misunderstandings) they both kill themselves. 

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has written of the notion of conversion hysteria in melodrama: that which the text represses on the level of plot and dialogue returns in the mise en scène as “hysterical” moments. Though Shakespeare’s text doesn’t leave much unsaid, the mise en scène excessively intensifies that which the characters are saying. Every emotion is overdetermined. When the two fall in love we’re told so by the film on the level of the music, the colour and the camera movement, as well as the dialogue. The function of camp in the film is to add a layer of signification to the narrative while distancing the viewer from it. When the pair meet she’s wearing wings and he’s wearing shining armour. She’s his angel; he’s her knight. When Romeo goes to the party, the acid tab he takes is imprinted with a broken heart. On one level, this campy mise en scène contributes to what we are shown about the characters’ state of mind; on another, it is so knowingly excessive that it has the paradoxical effect of making the dialogue and situation seem more naturalistic.

I am not sure that the film’s campness is necessarily a gay camp. True, the story of a forbidden love whose discovery brings catastrophic consequences has traditionally appealed to gay men (it’s no accident that Cukor and Zeffirelli directed previous Hollywood versions). This Romeo and Juliet could certainly and easily lend itself to a queer reading on many levels: the focus on Romeo, the display of the male body through the film, the types of sets, props and clothes the film utilises. But I don’t think it specifically addresses a gay subculture through its campness in the way, say, that Derek Jarman’s The Tempest does. Camp is just another element that – as in so many other post-modern films – helps Romeo + Juliet to construct its frame of reference and particular tone.

It’s a very hybrid film, one that quotes and borrows from everywhere and yet garners the requisite effects. At Romeo’s death scene, Romeo and Juliet lie on top of an altar. They are surrounded by crosses of red flowers in which blue neon lights are embedded. It could have become kitsch, but it isn’t. Though the film is quite knowingly referential (we see the Globe Theatre Pool Hall at the beginning of the film), there is no irony in the emotional scenes. The crosses are theatrical, but they suit the film’s world, complementing the tone of the scene and Romeo’s state of mind. They are part of the film’s construction of a vernacular that can convey Shakespeare’s story to a contemporary audience in a filmic way, eliciting a variety of feelings which, in the appropriate places, include laughter. But not boredom.