Didn't work

Rating: 3/10 (26 January 2002)

Had to post this. I've kept reading (since MOULIN ROUGE was released) what a genius Baz Luhrmann is, but I have to say I was disappointed with this. Maybe it's possible to set Shakespeare in the present day, but on this evidence, it just doesn't work. I watched the film on a rented DVD. I don't know the play well, and on occasions lost track of what was happening, so I tried to follow the text in my Complete Works of Shakespeare. It seemed to me that there were lots of passages of INVENTED Shakespearean verse - or did I just imagine this? Apart from the failure to convey the emotion that's vital to this story, there were examples throughout where the modern setting made nonsense of the story. At the crux of it all, I couldn't help asking myself why Pete Postlethwaite didn't tell Claire Danes "Now shallst thou to thy mobile phone ... Go and inform thy Romeo of our deed"! thus averting the tragedy and saving us from a truly feeble rendition of the climax. To me, the Zeffirelli version was better on every level.