Juliet is 13. Almost 14. She is not, as in all other portrayals, a young adolescent. She is a _child_. A child, in an adult body, with lots of hormones going around.
This is the only film that captures this right. Juliet is a child, captured in her family, the ethics and social rules of her times, and her own puberty. When she cries, you hear a little child crying. It is the same girl that cannot control her passions for her loved one. And these passions are not only, simple, pure, holy love. No sir. The girl is 13, Romeo is not much older. We're talking of the strongest puppy-love in history, together with pure, uncontrolled and undirected teenager lust. Did not Shakespeare write that Romeo's flaming and endless love flipped within a second from one young girl (Rosalina) to another (Juliet)? He understood teenager love a lot better than most directors of this play do!
Not to say that, in this film, their love isn't _real_. Man, I've never seen so much chemistry on the screen! Forget Danes and diCaprio. They are much better actors but they lose this one. By miles. Millions of miles. But Hussey and Whiting's love is not just that. It is not just chemistry. Not plain "love", this "pure thing" where everybody seems to think R&J is about. Forget it! It is teenage confusion, depression, rebellion, it is being a child and an adult at the same time, it is something they do not understand, it is clumsiness, hardly uncontrollable lust, it is very well possible that this love would turn into pure hatred if it had had some time to develop ... it is, simply said, the most complex and simple thing at the same time. And it's all there, in the portrayal of these two very young actors in the amazing direction by Zeffirelli. (Of whom I heard that he roamed the planet to find the actors he needed.)
Maybe the best advertisement is that I personally was not attracted to either one of the lovers. Which is usually the easiest way to make a screen-love convincing - and often the only way.
This films is, in spite of its gorgeous but convincing settings, brilliant camera work and beautiful (though dated) costumes and art-direction, very imperfect in many small ways. Olivia Hussey fake whines once too often. There are strange holes in Shakespeare's text. The end of the famous Mab monologue is too melodramatic. But all this helps to make you realize how _real_ this all feels. How every inch of your body tenses with emotion. If everything had been perfect, it would have been slick and not half as moving.
Take, for example, the scene in the tomb. In Romeo + Juliet (1996), they use a million candles. Nice effect. People remember that. It is not half the impact that the dead bodies, in different states of decay, simple, gruesome and beautiful, in this film have. They made a good decision by leaving out the fight between Romeo and Paris in the tomb (a very common cut, by the way) and focus on the deadly love scene between the dead only. Zeffirelli did the most perfect job by focusing only on what Romeo and Juliet is all about: love. What a masterpiece.
For never was there more beauty in woe
Than in this version of Juliet, and her Romeo.
This is the only film that captures this right. Juliet is a child, captured in her family, the ethics and social rules of her times, and her own puberty. When she cries, you hear a little child crying. It is the same girl that cannot control her passions for her loved one. And these passions are not only, simple, pure, holy love. No sir. The girl is 13, Romeo is not much older. We're talking of the strongest puppy-love in history, together with pure, uncontrolled and undirected teenager lust. Did not Shakespeare write that Romeo's flaming and endless love flipped within a second from one young girl (Rosalina) to another (Juliet)? He understood teenager love a lot better than most directors of this play do!
Not to say that, in this film, their love isn't _real_. Man, I've never seen so much chemistry on the screen! Forget Danes and diCaprio. They are much better actors but they lose this one. By miles. Millions of miles. But Hussey and Whiting's love is not just that. It is not just chemistry. Not plain "love", this "pure thing" where everybody seems to think R&J is about. Forget it! It is teenage confusion, depression, rebellion, it is being a child and an adult at the same time, it is something they do not understand, it is clumsiness, hardly uncontrollable lust, it is very well possible that this love would turn into pure hatred if it had had some time to develop ... it is, simply said, the most complex and simple thing at the same time. And it's all there, in the portrayal of these two very young actors in the amazing direction by Zeffirelli. (Of whom I heard that he roamed the planet to find the actors he needed.)
Maybe the best advertisement is that I personally was not attracted to either one of the lovers. Which is usually the easiest way to make a screen-love convincing - and often the only way.
This films is, in spite of its gorgeous but convincing settings, brilliant camera work and beautiful (though dated) costumes and art-direction, very imperfect in many small ways. Olivia Hussey fake whines once too often. There are strange holes in Shakespeare's text. The end of the famous Mab monologue is too melodramatic. But all this helps to make you realize how _real_ this all feels. How every inch of your body tenses with emotion. If everything had been perfect, it would have been slick and not half as moving.
Take, for example, the scene in the tomb. In Romeo + Juliet (1996), they use a million candles. Nice effect. People remember that. It is not half the impact that the dead bodies, in different states of decay, simple, gruesome and beautiful, in this film have. They made a good decision by leaving out the fight between Romeo and Paris in the tomb (a very common cut, by the way) and focus on the deadly love scene between the dead only. Zeffirelli did the most perfect job by focusing only on what Romeo and Juliet is all about: love. What a masterpiece.
For never was there more beauty in woe
Than in this version of Juliet, and her Romeo.