Behind the Red Curtain of Verona Beach: Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet

Extraordinary suspension of disbelief is a hallmark of Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. Ruptures in logic like Romeo’s bedroom near-miss are accepted by filmgoers conditioned to conventions of fantastical escapism alongside extreme verisimilitude. Luhrmann successfully collides the familiar (of verisimilitude) with the unfamiliar (of escapism), and meshes 1996 fashion, music and physicality with Elizabethan language, laws and social restraints. Luhrmann’s combined aesthetic is established within a distinctive, created world, uniquely crafted and microscopically detailed, in which every piece of text and dialogue is an intertextual reference from almost the entire breadth of the Shakespearian canon.

The difficulty of naturalizing Elizabethan language, customs and themes on film has, over the past century, yielded adaptations set in specific time-frames or places to establish distance, aesthetics employed by filmmakers including Olivier and Branagh. The perils of neglecting distance are seen in Michael Almereyda’s 2000 Hamlet, set in modern-day Manhattan. Almereyda’s hindrance was too-strong familiarity and blurred division between the fictional and the actual, where modern New Yorkers speak verse in well-known settings. This choice permits the audience to linger on anachronisms or overt familiarity, which undermines the story and draws attention to artificiality. The world of the director’s vision is essential to the success of the adaptation. This article examines the comprehensive world of Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and the extraordinary lengths taken – on a series of sliding levels – to ensure the film’s internal verisimilitude.