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Rating: One day an Australian director wakes up and with a sly smile says to himself: "Bravo Baz, you're a genius, you've had a badass idea." Then, after shaving, showering, and having breakfast, he thinks that maybe it would have been too daring, but by now he's quite pumped up and wants to try it anyway. "I love music, the kind that can give you a true emotion, that makes you dance, that makes you dream, that makes you cry...but I need a story...not a story that's just a clip for the music I love but an awesome story, a love story where my music is the soundtrack, and not like in just any movie but as in reality. Like that fluttering feeling in the stomach couples have. Because in every respectable couple, every moment is marked by a song, right?"
But Baz is a cool director, and certainly the idea of a love story sprinkled with some great songs isn't enough for him (he would have told himself the same years later before starting to shoot Moulin Rouge), and then he realizes that to give meaning to his project, he needs the greatest love story the world knows. Thus he remembers that a few years earlier a guy named William wrote this story of two kids who love each other but are terribly messed up because their families hate each other, and so on and so forth. Nice!!!... "Damn, though... I think an Italian director has already thought about making a film about these two," and then, while he was thinking this, he had a revelation. The most lethal love story ever + beautiful songs + modern setting + (attention, attention) the actors will recite the original texts...so that everything will seem modern but will not lose that poetic atmosphere that gave a fair success to the original work.
And so it is. The project comes to life, many will turn up their noses, but who cares! However, so that this film doesn't end up in oblivion before even being distributed, they needed some actor who would also attract hordes of adoring teenage girls... there was that blond guy who was not so famous yet (Titanic came later), handsome but truly good. Here we are, now the idea is complete.
Romeo + Juliet starts with these tasty premises.
Baz was right. Why not interpret a very famous story that everyone knows (even if, I swear, there were kids in the cinema who wondered how the film could end, hoping until the end that Leo/Romeo would be saved) according to his "modern" point of view? Surely, it takes courage to depict the Capulets and Montagues as two mafia families ruling a metropolis, it takes courage to turn sword duels into gunfights or to imagine Mercutio getting high on acid, it takes imagination and taste to make a tattooed Father Laurence believable (a brilliant Pete Postlethwaite, sadly recently passed away) or the Prince who is now the police chief.
But the merit of this film is that above all the post-modern hullabaloo staged, the love story survives... just as Baz likes it. DiCaprio and Danes are truly good, and I would even say credible... they portray that desperate and difficult love that makes you scream your lungs out, that passion that the director knows how to imprint on his actors, making them cry and rejoice with such naturalness (do you remember Ewan Mcgregor and Nicole Kidman?)... in short, what Muccino has been trying to do for years with his, but he can't succeed.
Moreover, there's what the original project envisioned as the guiding thread: music. Beautiful songs (those who love Radiohead know what I'm talking about) inserted into the narrative to mark every moment.
A courageous, curious, intriguing film; a winning bet, a film by a director who is a "real" director.
"Bravo Baz, you're a genius, you've had a badass idea"
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