{"id":820718,"date":"2026-11-01T12:22:08","date_gmt":"2026-11-01T12:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/820718\/"},"modified":"2026-11-01T12:22:08","modified_gmt":"2026-11-01T12:22:08","slug":"romeo-juliet-at-30-how-baz-luhrmann-made-teens-fall-in-love-with-shakespeare-baz-luhrmann","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/820718\/","title":{"rendered":"Romeo + Juliet at 30: how Baz Luhrmann made teens fall in love with Shakespeare | Baz Luhrmann"},"content":{"rendered":"

Romeo + Juliet is not the most renowned or beloved of Shakespeare\u2019s plays, but it is perhaps the most foundational. The 16th-century tragedy, a story of love-addled teenagers and white-hot resentment, is often an English student\u2019s first introduction to the bard\u2019s oeuvre \u2013 more accessible and relatable to teens, with its plaintive lust and histrionic mood swings, than the more austere machinations in, say, Macbeth, Hamlet or Othello. And if Romeo + Juliet is the young person\u2019s entry to Elizabethan English, perhaps no version of it is more worthy of the term \u201cgateway drug\u201d than Baz Luhrmann\u2019s 1996 film version, which reimagined Verona\u2019s family feud as a tropical gang war and launched an army of teenage crushes with the faces of Leonardo DiCaprio<\/a> and Claire Danes.<\/p>\n

The maximalist interpretation of Shakespeare\u2019s most lovelorn work, released 30 years ago this week (!), retains Elizabethan verse but announces its divergence from rigid classicism from the jump. Our scene<\/a> is set in fair Verona beach by a news anchor via TV set, relaying the woe of two star-cross\u2019d lovers before clips of civil strife. Fresh off his breakout success in 1992\u2019s Strictly Ballroom, the Australian director boldly mapped the medieval story on to 90s tabloid fixations \u2013 grainy footage of violence in the streets, magazine headlines of capos and criminals, helicopter views of car chases and riots that recalled the media circus around the OJ Simpson chase two years prior. It is a movie that could have only been made in the 90s; Luhrmann\u2019s vision of two warring families as rival gangs, replete with their own economic operations and marked territory, tapped into the era\u2019s preoccupation with gangland as a source of transportive art, from movies to hip-hop, and as a conservative fixation for ideas on intrinsic criminality.<\/p>\n

Luhrmann and his wife, costume designer Catherine Martin, reimagined Verona as a sun-scorched beach city, incorporating real locations \u2013 Mexico City\u2019s famed Immaculate Heart of Mary Church and Chapultepec Palace, Veracruz\u2019s Boca del R\u00edo \u2013 to convey an urban den of simultaneous reverence and decay. The Montagues, with their heedless hollering and open Hawaiian shirts, and the Capulets, urban cowboys in Cuban-heeled boots, nearly vibrate with loathing and brandish guns marked by Catholic iconography. Perhaps compensating for the at times impenetrable verse, Luhrmann cut and spliced and twirled the camera in a frenetic, at times literal firework display of manic energy. The film\u2019s raucous shootouts and parties now read as an obvious precursor to Euphoria high school \u2013 these kids dressed up and showed out, popped ecstasy and ripped around town in souped-up cars. Watching a single scene, even the lovers\u2019 infamous fish tank meet-cute<\/a>, has the feel of chugging an energy drink.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

As such, the blatantly youth-aimed film had plenty of detractors in its time. Critics dismissed it as vulgar and garish, but audiences turned out en masse; Romeo + Juliet made over $147m against a $14.5m budget, boosted in part by a period-defining soundtrack with needle drops from The Cardigans, Everclear, Radiohead and Garbage. (And of course, the song from that oft-replayed fish tank scene, Des\u2019ree\u2019s I\u2019m Kissing You<\/a>, became the ubiquitous soundtrack for couple-shipping montage videos on 2000s YouTube). By the time I first viewed the film in 2009 \u2013 like many, in high school English class, as part of my teacher\u2019s bid to get us invested in Shakespeare \u2013 it was already considered a classic.<\/p>\n

That my teacher\u2019s bid worked is largely due to the performances of the film\u2019s two luminous stars, both brimming with the type of uncut, untameable desire known only to youth. Romeo + Juliet, of course, was a movie about teenage obsession that sparked a million teenage obsessions with DiCaprio (including from yours truly, who cried in English class not over the lovers\u2019 double suicide \u2013 soooo melodramatic of them! \u2013 but over the realization that youth is fleeting and I would never be with anyone so beautiful. Devastating!) But it is a 17-year-old Danes, in a role originally intended for a text-accurate 13-year-old Natalie Portman (correctly deemed too childlike next to a 21-year-old DiCaprio), that shines on a rewatch. Her beauty is wide-open and uncomplicated, her face shaded with feelings as fresh and fleeting as morning dew. When her face falls, upon realizing her lover\u2019s suicide, you feel, too, the ear-ringing fall of one\u2019s first galling disappointment, the lurch of a sickening comedown.<\/p>\n

Claire Danes as Juliet in Romeo + Juliet. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd\/Alamy<\/p>\n

That is the genius of Luhrmann\u2019s Romeo + Juliet: it is a feelings-first movie, a portrait of teenage melodrama where all emotions exist only at full volume. That\u2019s true for the highs \u2013 when the lip-locked lovers careen across a pool, or when Harold Perrineau\u2019s Mercutio enters the scene<\/a> with a high-kick in full silver drag to Kym Mazelle\u2019s Young Hearts Run Free \u2013 as with the lows. In Luhrmann\u2019s vision, Mercutio\u2019s death at the hands of John Leguizamo\u2019s Tybalt, a devilish sharpshooter with a soul patch, lands as equally tragic and torturous as the lovers. Perrineau stumbles, processes and curses both houses with such fervor as a real hurricane swept into Veracruz, that the rest of the film feels muted without him. And still, Romeo\u2019s agonized poisoning, which frankly puts DiCaprio\u2019s more famous death in the North Atlantic to shame, lands as a timeless gut-punch. So much youthful idealism and beauty, wasted on such petty grievances.<\/p>\n

Luhrmann\u2019s masterpiece more than transcended the more straightforward Shakespeare adaptations of the era, such as Kenneth Branagh\u2019s Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Hamlet (1996), Trevor Nunn\u2019s Twelfth Night (1996) and Michael Hoffman\u2019s A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream (1999). It arguably inspired the many modernizations kicked off by the runaway success of 1999\u2019s 10 Things I Hate About You and continued by Easy A and She\u2019s the Man. It quite evidently inspired a recent Broadway revival<\/a>, starring Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, that borrowed the Romeo + Juliet styling and the film\u2019s stir-crazy bombast. But nothing has quite captured the imagination, or imparted the hot blood coursing in Shakespeare\u2019s literary characters, like those two cursed houses in Verona beach. Thirty years on, we are still waiting for the next truly great, pop culture-shifting Shakespeare moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Romeo + Juliet is not the most renowned or beloved of Shakespeare\u2019s plays, but it is perhaps the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":820719,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-820718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=820718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/820719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=820718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=820718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=820718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}