The two most pastiched moments in the film – when the lovers steal glimpses of each other through a tropical-fish tank and, later, confirm their relationship status in the Capulet pool – are memorable not only for their daring reinvention of the original (inverting the blocking of the balcony scene is a stroke of genius), but also for how they let us experience the heart-thumping whirlwind of love at first sight. Desire bounces off the screen in the film, whether it’s Juliet curling her fingers through her husband’s rain-soaked hair or Romeo emerging from an inadvertent swim proposing marriage (that Leo is soaking wet during both these sequences speaks for itself). For all the choral Prince covers and billowing Hawaiian shirts, R+J never loses sight of the steadfast passion that drives it and, unlike today’s all but neutered Hollywood movies, possesses an undeniable sexual potency. He looks at her with complete, open-faced adoration and she returns his gaze with shy, pink-cheeked delight. This is, above all, a retelling of the most famous love story ever written, and the film takes care to quieten the noise and slow the pace during Romeo and Juliet’s scenes together.Īs the star-crossed lovers, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes have a smouldering romantic chemistry palpable enough to make any viewer weak at the knees. And yet, the director always knows exactly when to relent his barrelling dynamism. It is a sensory overload of a movie from a film-maker now renowned for such excess – Luhrmann’s follow-up to R+J would be the similarly go-for-broke Moulin Rouge.
Edited with the frantic energy of a sugar-high toddler, it zips along at adrenalin-jolting speed, stopping off to observe drug-fuelled drag performances and frenzied car chases, petrol-station gun fights and rowdy snooker games. Romeo + Juliet is fresh, it’s original, it’s alive. The otherwise tricky Elizabethan dialogue is never an impediment to understanding because the director visualises the action so meticulously from the outset, denoting the characters and their relationships to one another with on-screen text, and doubling back to deliver the opening sonnet more slowly for a second time to ensure we have fully grasped the story beats before launching us into the narrative.
He creates an eye-popping, neon-washed world where swords become guns, prologists become TV newsreaders and messengers are Fedex delivery drivers. Luhrmann translates Romeo & Juliet for the MTV generation and updates its outmoded iconography, thereby giving himself space to situate the 400-year-old play firmly in the here and now. He is entitled to his opinion, of course, but I’d venture that this version was not intended for him (and, indeed, the fact that the movie went on to snag the number-one spot at the US box office upon release proves that it carried plenty of appeal to other audiences). In his two-star review, the film journalist Roger Ebert sniffed that “this production was a very bad idea” and it would “dismay any lover of Shakespeare”. This outré, punk approach to the 16th-century tragedy was largely met with critical derision in 1996. Referenced in Halloween costumes and Euphoria episodes to this day, his fizzing, sparking, pistol-toting adaptation blazed across our screens and blasted the dust off Shakespeare. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, which turns 25 this month, was a cultural reset before the term was popularised, indelibly printing its stamp on our collective imaginations.