For some teens in the mid-’90s, time was cleaved into two distinct eras: before the release of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and after. In the dark ages, Shakespeare was forced reading in school, hard and unintelligible. Claire Danes was merely a small-screen star, Leonardo DiCaprio an art-house baby. When Luhrmann’s swirling, garish film exploded onto the scene, the world cracked open (for some people, at least — Roger Ebert called the adaptation “greatly depressing”). In a bold move, Luhrmann kept Shakespeare’s dialogue intact but modernized everything else. The Verona of the original play was transformed into Verona Beach, a place where the universal truths of Shakespeare were revealed to the sounds of Radiohead and Prince, Danes was lifted to stardom with angels’ wings, and everyone understood that it was best to hold a handgun sideways for maximum tragedy. Thirty years on, the film has not wavered in its ability to make flesh the ridiculous, outsized, and violent emotions of youth. In a 1996 interview after the film’s release Luhrmann mused,  “With Romeo and Juliet I’ve dealt with their world as if their parents are like a Busby Berkeley musical on acid and it’s coming at them all the time and it won’t shut up… if you pass down to an incoming generation your hatred, your anger and bitterness, then you are going to end up with a tragedy, it is going to come back on you.” (Text courtesy of Chicago Film Society) 

35mm from the Chicago Film Society, permission Disney

Preceded by:  1996 trailer reel – 10 min – 35mm from the Chicago Film Society