Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is turning 25 this year and is still a milestone watch in adolescence; it has stayed youthful without succumbing to that retrospective wince that a lot of our favourite 90s movies now give us when looking back. This version has become so iconic that when you see references to the story in pop culture, it's often not the balcony scene but the fish tank ‘meet-cute’.
Set in the modern suburbs of Verona, swords are now guns, and the cast are dressed in Dolce and Prada, all while reciting dialog mostly unchanged from the original Shakespearean text. Staying true to its source while making the world's aesthetic perfectly garish mean this retelling could sit between two moments in history and in turn remain ‘timeless’.
This movie was career-changing for its director; he earned a BAFTA and would go on to close his ‘red curtain trilogy’, with another cult classic, Moulin Rouge. It was also costume designer Kym Barrett's big break - a woman who would later bring us the iconic Matrix coat.
Kym mixed religious imagery with a modern colour palette and created a style that is still influential today. For the Montagues it was clean lines, all black, bullet vests and embellished boots; for the Capulets it was bright colours, adornments, and billowing fabrics.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s Hawaiian shirt for example became a culture symbol all of its own, Luhrmann said that the shirt will “wax and wane in its relative cultural coolness at any given moment. But there will always be — if we're lucky — some lingering symbolic palimpsest of Romeo as that young boy in the Hawaiian shirt, who literally 'wore' paradise on his back."
But the ultimate grandeur is saved for the Capulet's party. Each costume symbolic of the roles played: the angel, the knight, Mother Cleopatra and Mercutio, life of the party, opening the scene in drag, lip syncing to Kym Mazelle. All costumes that again are seen every Halloween. You could put on the right pair of wings, and it wouldn't be “oh you’re an angel”, it would be, “Juliet?”.
This release had all the components to be an instant cult classic. It was a breakout role for a 90s heartthrob - DiCaprio - and was soundtracked by Radiohead, The Cardigans and Garbage. Upon release, it even inspired takedowns from ‘highbrow’ reviewers like this.
“Baz Luhrmann puts Shakespeare’s greatest romance in a choke-hold and takes it slam-dancing” - Desson Howe, Washington Post.
You can't make a successful cult-followed film without ruffling the feathers of the pseudo intellectual. Luhrmann even said this himself, he wanted to take the snobbery out of it and ‘re-reveal, the real Shakespeare’ and he did, for a whole new generation. So well in fact, that both me and my older sister were shown it in high school English class. I'm sure we weren't the only ones.
This film is rich in every way, right from the opening dialog edited like whiplash to the penultimate death scene lit by 100 candles. Though you know the story and how it ends, and you've seen the same plot over and over in a slew of retellings, this one, with all its glitz and glamour, stays feeling new.
Words by Josie Lauren, for Female First.
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