Romeo + Juliet

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