Works for me, because it allows everything to be visually blasted and inexorably tragic. So Hamlet is given a psychotropic by Mercutio before going to the party. Baz gets this as well: Modern magic is what? Drugs. The dream they shared the night before is the axis of the whole action: rather like the magic of the witches in Macbeth. We understand that Romeo and Mercutio studied magic (`philosophy') abroad together much as Hamlet and Horatio had. Mercutio in the play is a emotionally engaged visionary mystic. For Shakespeare, she's the white space on the palette. Baz fails here, and so provides no center. We NEED to know about the dead sister and why the nurse turns on Juliet in order to save her life. The Nurse is the true domestic, raw nature, full of uncompromised loyalty but ultimately compromised. This friar is a terrific, memorable performance of someone who believes he can defeat nature. The congruence is lost in this film, but Baz definitely gets the magic part as well as the superfluous ritual of the church. The play equates the magic of language with the magic of potions, equally deadly. The Friar is an alchemical master hiding under the cloak of the Church. As a separate matter, the play has three anchors: Mercutio, the Friar and the Nurse. So we have a playhouse with the back part blasted out to the sea. The real message, which comes through loud and clear if you know the play (or even Zefrelli's film) is not the distance between the reality of events and the language, but the reality of the richness of the real play and this film. But in the real play, there are so many and such subtle explorations of the theme, and these are scoured away here for a few broad effects. Living under water is used to good effect. This is why Juliet has to see a LIVE Romeo at the end. Some of the experiment works since we get the message of the difference between what we see and what is true. And what acting skill they have from film is all in the face, not the tongue. Both Romeo and Juliet are incapable of performing the poetry anyway: they are children learning on the job. I imagine Baz directing the players to not worry so much about the poetry. The solution is to convert all the metaphors from language to vision.
#Watch romeo and juliet 1996 full movie how to
So here is the solution to the problem on how to make a film (which is primarily a visual medium) out of a play that leverages poetic language. These Latins are superficial visually and not verbally. He deliberately straddles the border between apparent truth and satire. Baz adds the additional dimension of the people being captured by the superstitious underbelly of the Church. It works because these stereotypes are powerful memes which attract many hosts which perpetuate their underlying truth.
In this film, the director has exaggerated the Latin macho ethic to have the same effect 16th century Londoners would get. Today, we roll those up under the relatively crude notion of stupid Latin macho.
Latins in his day were considered: Foppish: Quick to violence (a stereotype that has been inherited by blacks today, but to Londoners, Italians were nearly Africans): Incredibly proud especially as regards slights to masculinity: Obsessed with weapons. Italians to Shakespeare's England were a comical people, and his setting of the play there would have encouraged the audience to bring heavy stereotypes to the drama. But here we have some interesting choices. While it cut some valuable language, sacrificed to the gods of contemporary patience, it is by far the better version. Zefrelli made his own choices in the earlier film these were relatively conventional. But alas it suffers from another blessing which is also a curse: the story itself is so powerful that one can build any sort of film or play or whatever around it and have it be likely to work. So among the plays, this may be one of the hardest to film. This is not Shakespeare's best play, but it has his best poetry that's because the play is ABOUT language, about the difference between what something is and the language used to describe it.
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