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Tag Archives: Romeo and Juliet

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #66: Romeo and Juliet (2013)

03 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

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Architecture porn, Carlo Carlei, Christian Cooke, Damian Lewis, Douglas Booth, Ed Westwick, Hailee Steinfeld, Julian Fellowes, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Natascha McElhone, Paul Giamatti, Romeo and Juliet

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film 2

66. Carlo Carlei’s Romeo and Juliet (2013)

Why does Carlo Carlei’s Romeo and Juliet make me cranky?

Romeo and Juliet 8

I think part of the problem is that David Tattersall’s camera is a little too enamored with the posh art direction of Gianpaolo Rifino and Armando Savoia. These Renaissance mansions of Verona make our best museums look like hovels, with nearly all of the numerous servants necessary for the upkeep of such mansions mostly banished from sight. The actors and Shakespeare’s words are chiefly there just to serve the imagery. This Romeo and Juliet is architecture porn.

Some of it is churches, but only the iconography gives that away.

Romeo and Juliet 7

The principal young male actors, too, seem cast for their photogenic dreaminess—human architecture. Ed Westwick as Tybalt looks like the lovechild of a young Johnny Depp and Antonio Banderas.

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His aquiline nose, fiercely arching eyebrows, big jaw, and long hair make him seem like a pre-Raphaelite dream.

Romeo and Juliet 2

Douglas Booth as Romeo looks like a beautiful mannequin, with large cheekbones and full pouty lips.

Romeo and Juliet 10

Christian Cooke as Tybalt is darkly, dashingly handsome, an ever-so-slightly gothic touch.

Romeo and Juliet 4

Oh, yes, Hailee Steinfeld was 16 when she portrayed Juliet, and almost looks like she could be thirteen, as the text dictates. She looks sort of androgynous, like Kodi Smit-McPhee who plays Benvolio.

Romeo and Juliet 11

Just in case one can overlook how beautiful this tragedy is supposed to look (kind of like a grand opera), Abel Korzeniowski’s score sounds like what might happen if Yanni performed some variations of soap opera themes with a dash of Michael Nyman or Philip Glass.

The effect is more depressing than tragic, if you ask me.

One odder thing into this mix is how Julian Fellowes would rewrite minor elements of the plot to make the story seem even more tragic than Shakespeare made it. Perhaps he suspected how little relevance the story would have in such an unrelenting cinematic aesthetic of excruciating beauty.

If so many actors blend into the cheesy music and opulent scenery, the fault isn’t necessarily theirs. The performances are quite satisfactory—the acting never demolishes the film. Douglas Booth may look like a mannequin, but he doesn’t act like one.

Romeo and Juliet 5

And some veteran actors like Paul Giamatti (the Friar), Damian Lewis (Lord Capulet), and Natascha McElhone (Lady Capulet) contribute wonderfully.

Romeo and Juliet 9

Westwick and Cooke make great foes.

Romeo and Juliet 12

If you are much younger than I am (perhaps you haven’t been born yet), and long to see a Romeo and Juliet presented as an Italian soap opera version of a Renaissance fairy tale, then this is the movie for you.

At its worst, it’s still infinitely preferable to Romeo + Juliet, which you should only watch if you’ve been kicked in the head by a mule.


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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #8: Romeo and Juliet (1968)

11 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

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Franzo Zeffirelli, Kevin Crawford, Olivia Hussey, Romeo and Juliet

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film 3

#8: Romeo and Juliet (1968)

Shakespeare in Love is a meta-narrative that simultaneously enacts Romeo and Juliet while imagining the story behind the play’s composition.

So it’s about time I reviewed a straightforward Romeo and Juliet, so let’s talk about Franco Zeffirelli’s version from 1968.

Romeo and Juliet poster

This is the only good cinematic R&J I know of, apart from Shakespeare in Love.

At the height of the psychedelic era, Zeffirelli went with a traditional setting: the early Renaissance, in a Verona that actually looks like an Italian city from that era.

While I am not against some Modern re-settings of the plays, and not even against anachronistically jumbling several eras, depending on the context, the psychology of Romeo and Juliet, in particular the psychology of Juliet, needs to be understood in a much more patriarchal world.

More on this later.

Romeo and Juliet fight

The male citizenry of Verona seem prone to violence, but that may be because everyone is wearing codpieces that are painfully tight.

The Codpieces of Romeo and Juliet

My late colleague, Kevin Crawford, once pointed out to me that Zeffirelli’s shrewdness in approaching the violence of this tragedy is to have most of it be realistically awkward and inept. Some of these men and boys might know how to fight, but outside the context of a duel, the result is farcical chaos that nevertheless causes havoc in the marketplace and town. Men’s fists are bent at the wrist as they try to pummel each other in close quarters in the mud, in their colorful, striped breeches. Terrified chickens and furniture get in the way.

The weird scope of the wretched melee of Act I is important, as it sets up the drama, and the heartwarming and heartbreaking turns of the back-to-back fights in Act III.

Oh, right. This is a love story.

Romeo and Juliet 3

While a terrible Romeo can ruin any R&J, the litmus test of any production is the quality of its Juliet, because that is the most difficult part to pull off.

Juliet is smarter than Romeo, yet she “hath not seen the change of fourteen years.”

Romeo is a teenaged serial lovelorn seeker of unrequited love (emo before there was emo), a dope who can’t help falling psychotically in love with women–in fact, he was at the Capulet’s party to prove he could not find another woman more beautiful than Rosaline when he sees Juliet. Zeffirelli carefully shows Romeo watching Rosaline intently, the camera following her dancing–when Juliet is seen behind her, and the camera cannot look away from Olivia Hussey, I mean Juliet.

ROMEO AND JULIET, from left: Olivia Hussey, Leonard Whiting, 1968

According to IMDB, Hussey was only fifteen when working on this film; according to math, she was seventeen, or perhaps sixteen, or both, unless the film was made two years prior to its release.

Something about her–her costume, her poise, her youth mixed with such “change”–lets us believe that not only would Romeo find her so much more beautiful than the perfectly beautiful Rosaline, but that his claim that she has ended his youthful, changeable longings might also be right.

But Olivia Hussey can act. As I said, Juliet is the toughest part, because she must withstand Romeo’s advances and negotiate his commitment to her, all while being dazed by her own feelings of love for him.

Her father seems reluctant to see her wed in Act I, but that changes after her cousin Tybalt’s murder by Romeo.

I remember reading Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade, and asking my teacher why Juliet didn’t just run away to be with Romeo when he was exiled from Verona. When they meet outside her balcony, she even tells Romeo that if they wed, “all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay / And follow thee my lord throughout the world.”

Eloping a few days after their secret wedding! Why is that not a better plan than elaborately faking a suicide?

Sure, the Friar is hoping to mend the feud between Montagues and Capulets, but who cares what he wants. Why did Juliet accede to this freakishly dangerous plan when her father threatens to disown her?

Dunno, my teacher said, as she tried to keep a student from smashing another student to death with his desk.

Bad things happen when you read Shakespeare’s plays without seeing them performed.

The answer is, of course, that Juliet cannot easily imagine that she can be a wife, but no longer be a Capulet–no longer be her father’s daughter. Once again, she isn’t yet fourteen.

Romeo and Juliet Kiss

Juliet trusts the priest, after the nurse betrays her, but swearing that heart and soul she thinks Juliet should marry the plan Paris because of her father’s wishes, and because a relationship with Romeo would be doomed. This after the nurse has been so complicit in her charge’s relationship with Romeo.

When Juliet awakes in the tomb next to Romeo’s corpse, the good Friar whines, “A greater power than we can contradict / Hath thwarted our intents.” Sure, blame God for making that horrible plan backfire.

I can have these observations about the psychodynamics of Romeo and Juliet because the movie is good rather than screamingly stupid (I am looking at you, Baz Luhrmann).

The cast includes Michael York (who you might know as Basil Exposition, Logan of Logan’s Run, or the Brian Roberts from Cabaret), Milo O’Shea, and Leonard Whiting as Romeo. Laurence Olivier visited the set and talked his way into the movie as the prologue, and other voices.

Often when directors stay especially traditional in setting, the effect is dusty boredom, but that isn’t at all the case with this Romeo and Juliet. It’s a gem.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

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Shakespearing #13: Romeo and Juliet

14 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing

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David Foley, Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

Shakespearing #13 by David Foley

Romeo and Juliet

12 Romeo and Juliet

One of the pleasures of re-reading a familiar text is that things you’ve taken for granted suddenly leap out at you. Like that prologue. Why would Shakespeare begin his liveliest play with a plodding plot summary in sonnet form?

My first playwright’s thought is producer interference. “But how will they know it’s a tragedy?” Shakespeare’s colleagues worry. (It’s a producer’s job to assume audiences are dumb.)

How indeed? The play begins with a comic bit which, in most productions, turns the fight that follows into operetta, despite the fact that blood clearly flows. (As evidence, we have not just the Prince’s “neighbor-stained steel” but Romeo’s line, “O me, what fray was here?” What could he be seeing but blood?) Then we get Romeo mooning hyperbolically about love, Capulet’s bustling preparations for the party, some comic business with the servingman, after which our heroine is introduced in a scene dominated by one of the theatre’s most richly drawn comic characters. What kind of way is that to start a tragedy?

My second thought is that Shakespeare himself wanted the prologue. Lately I’ve been reading James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. One of Shapiro’s points is that Shakespeare increasingly chafed against the conventions of Elizabethan theatre. One of those conventions might have been starting a play while the audience was as yet imperfectly attending. How long did it take for the spectators to finish shushing each other and listen up? The prologue famously ends with a dig at the audience: “What here shall miss our toil shall strive to mend.”

And then we’re plunged into action. This seems breathtaking to me now. I can’t think of a previous Shakespeare play that does this. The prologue now (third thought) seems like a form of joke, its stodgy locutions a carpet that’s about to be yanked out from under the audience.

You notice, too, how fluidly he’s using the stage space. In the opening scenes, the main characters—Benvolio, Capulet, Romeo, Paris—weave in and out, coupling and re-coupling, swirling the stage with life.

If you want to know why Shakespeare remains a touchstone for playwrights (a friend tells me that Arthur Miller learned his craft by typing out Shakespeare’s plays), read Romeo and Juliet. Read the scene in which the Nurse returns to Juliet with her message from Romeo. Feel the joy of what Tennessee Williams once called “that cloudy, flickering, evanescent—fiercely charged!—interplay of live human beings…”

You can learn subtler lessons from Shakespeare. The compressed time frame of the play is astonishing, but this compression also happens within individual scenes. When the Nurse brings news of Tybalt’s death, Juliet suddenly intuits the narrative the Nurse hasn’t quite explained. These lacunae, easy to notice on the page, play out on stage only as an electric charge leaping a gap.

The other playwriting lesson to be learnt from Shakespeare is one some playwrights never learn. Shakespeare never allows a vibrating tension to resolve. (This, too, I’m getting from Shapiro.) I wonder if Romeo and Juliet’s story would still be as potent if it weren’t so hard to name it as either love or desire. Various characters (Mercutio, Friar Laurence, the Nurse) keep reframing love as desire, and even the second chorus describes the lovers as “alike bewitched by the charm of looks.” Juliet’s (and actually Shakespeare’s) insistence on Romeo’s beauty keeps their love from resolving into a sentimental idea and makes Juliet’s love both intense and girlishly real. We’re left with a spectacle that’s both a massive mutual crush and an enduring tragedy of love.

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David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

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