With his second movie, Strictly Ballroom director Baz Luhrmann hit upon a “more is more” approach to make Shakespeare pop. And it worked. Updating the play and giving it a Latin crime family dynamic, Luhrmann suggests that the Bard would be Brian de Palma if he were alive today. Well, maybe — you don’t have to agree to be carried away by the movie’s intoxicated self-belief, its sheer creative abundance, and especially the work of production designer Catherine Martin (Mrs Luhrmann) and DP Donald McAlpine, the cinematographer responsible for many New Australian Cinema classics.
Baz Luhrmann’s gleefully cinematic version of the play is so relentlessly inventive and innovative, it takes 20 minutes to get a grasp on how appropriate is his approach to the material. Bravely (but sensibly) sticking with the original dialogue, Luhrmann makes the central element of his audacious adaptation visual: as the camera races wildly around, or rests on luminous close-ups and ornate tableaux, the striking sets, costumes, characters, the colours and compositions serve perfectly to evoke the forces of wealth and poverty, love and hate, power and pride, prejudice and superstition that infest the chaotically sprawling post-punk, post-industrial, multi-ethnic world of millennial Verona Beach (Mexico City and Vera Cruz, heavily made over). Fine as the rest of the cast is, it’s DiCaprio and Danes – vulnerable, innocent, impassioned and beautiful, both of them — who steal the honours.
Geoff Andrew, Time Out
Media Partner
Baz Luhrmann
Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, John Leguizamo, Brian Dennehy, Miriam Margolyes, Pete Postlethwaite, Harold Perrineau, Paul Sorvino, Diane Venora
Australia/Canada/Mexico/USA
1996
English
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Screenwriter
Craig Pearce, Baz Luhrmann
Cinematography
Donald M. McAlpine
Editor
Jill Bilcock
Original Music
Marius De Vries, Nellee Hooper
Production Design
Catherine Martin
Art Director
Doug Hardwick
Also in This Series
The Double Life of Veronique
Irène Jacob won Best Actress honours at Cannes in 1991 for her double role in The Double Life of Véronique, the haunting, seductive metaphysical fable that was Polish master Krzysztof Kieslowski's feature follow-up to The Decalogue.
The Conversation
Gene Hackman is Harry Caul, 'the best bugger on the West Coast', a surveillance expert whose jealously guarded anonymity is threatened when he happens across what seems to be a murder plot.
The Fall (4K Restoration)
Shot over four years across 24 countries, cowritten by a six year old girl, and entirely self-financed by commercials director Tarsem, The Fall is such a mind- (and eye) boggling movie it's hard to believe it actually exists. Yet here it is!