Two houses, both alike in dignity...
It's hard to believe that Romeo + Juliet is twenty years old, and in its second decade, Baz Luhrmann's fast and loose take on Shakespeare's love story is still angstier, more vital and much better looking than pretty much everything we've seen on screen since. As the '90s teen classic comes of age, we revisit all the reasons we fell in love in the first place...
It ignited our longstanding thing for Leonardo DiCaprio
Titanic catapulted him into the major league of teen poster boys, but we first fell in love with Leo as a curtain-haired Romeo, smoking on the beach in a Hawaiian shirt. Very tortured, very good looking and speaking in iambic pentameter: it's a formula that proved fatal to our teenage hearts. Twenty years on and Leo is more serial modeliser on a Citibike than sharp-cheekboned matinee idol, but we'd still forgive him just about anything and listen to him talk about the environment (for a little while, at least).
The soundtrack is one of the greats
Music is a huge part of Luhrmann's oeuvre (see also: Moulin Rouge! and its glittering mixture of borrowed glam rock and original tracks), and he recruited some of the best for Romeo + Juliet's soundtrack. Curated by Massive Attack producer Nellee Hooper and composers Craig Armstrong and Marius de Vries, the film's OST is much more than background music - featuring the Cardigans' 'Lovefool,' Radiohead's 'Talkshow Host' and of course Des'ree's 'Kissing You,' it's the ultimate post-Britpop mixtape.
Visually, it's dazzling
Put simply, Romeo + Juliet is a film that’s beautiful to watch – and we’re not just talking about its two very photogenic leads. It’s filled with the sort of scenes that burn themselves into your imagination and never leave, from the moment on the balcony to Romeo’s long walk down the neon-lit church aisle (SOB). Baz Luhrmann’s more-is-more-and-then-some attitude isn’t to everyone’s taste, but it has never looked better than in this film. We're guessing the director probably agrees: if you've watched his recent Netflix project The Get Down, you'll doubtless have been grabbed by some very striking similarities between the two.
It's the first direct encounter with Shakespeare that we actually enjoyed
It’s no secret that teen movies have borrowed heavily from the Bard. 10 Things I Hate About You is famously a high school re-working of The Taming Of The Shrew, while She’s The Man steals its gender-swapping plot from Twelfth Night. Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet took Shakespeare’s tragedy from medieval ‘fair Verona’ to a contemporary Verona Beach painted in technicolour, but – on the director’s insistence – kept the language of the original. The result? An overwrought melodrama that chimed particularly well with our equally overwrought teenage selves. Even dissecting and re-dissecting scenes for GCSE coursework couldn’t dim its appeal.
The fish tank scene. Enough said.
If there's an underlying reason for your inability to get on board with the swipe-right dating model, it's probably Romeo and Juliet's devastating meet cute: rather than 'boy meets girl,' it's 'boy catches sight of girl through a tropical fish tank,' all to the soundtrack of Des'ree's 'Kissing You.' He's wearing chainmail, she's dressed as an angel; it's love at first sight. Perfection.
It's a perfect Tumblr movie
It's a space where Nineties pop culture can be preserved in virtual amber (complete with a pithy or emotive screen cap) to live forever online, and while Romeo + Juliet predates household Internet (unless you had a dial-up modem, in which case, kudos), there's something undeniably 'Tumblr' about the film's look. The neon iconography, the trippy party scene and yes, Leo's curtains all lend themselves to being played on repeat in tiny gif form. As for the 'crying Leo' meme that cropped up every awards season? It started with a Romeo + Juliet still. Titanic aside, it's probably DiCaprio's most meme-able film...
It's the ultimate doomed romance
Shakespearean spoiler alert: things do not end well for the film's star crossed lovers (we've never been able to look at a tealight in the same way since...) Cramming in a secret wedding, a family feud and the ultimate tear-jerking finale, it's a doomed romance that - even at 20 years' distance - we can't resist. We're not sure of the psychology that draws us to miserable love stories rather than, say, tales of well-adjusted couples that live into middle age, but we are sure that if we end up streaming R+J on Netflix tonight, even the most waterproof of mascaras won't stand a chance...
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