Product: Romeo and Juliet [Region 2] (1968)
Rating: 5.0
Flaws Redeemed by Indescribable Beauty
The difference between a Ferrari and a Miata is that, when the tail-light lens falls off of your Miata, you swear. When the tail-light lens falls off of your Ferrari, you carefully pick it up, wash it off in lukewarm water with a little dish soap, and go down to the Ferrari dealership to pay $47 for an original hand-made pair of Italian screws to replace the ones that vibrated out, and you screw it back on with the words "Thank goodness it wasn't broken."Why? Because a Miata is a mass-produced appliance, while a Ferrari is a hand-made work of art that has a soul. This film is a Ferrari, and it inspires nothing but awe and fierce, passionate love even as its tail-light lenses are falling off and its door handles are loose and its chrome trim obviously isn't perfectly straight. As an English teacher, I've seen this film approximately 35 times now, and I am still entertained by finding new technical inconsistencies in it. A list of them would be almost impossible to compile, but for example, Benvolio is stabbed in the eye by Tybalt's sword at the very start of the film, and something like five minutes later he is talking to Lady Capulet, completely unwounded. Tybalt repeatedly tells Romeo to "turn and draw," despite the fact that he isn't wearing a sword, and later Romeo approaches the tomb with his sword on, then enters it with the sword having mysteriously disappeared. Juliet is put into the grave with her shroud covered in roses thrown by grieving local maidens, but later when Romeo appears to pull the shroud away, the roses have disappeared. And it goes on and on and on through the film. Technically, from the standpoint of mere careful film-making, this film is an undeniable mess.And to my students and to me and to apparently hundreds of thousands of other people across the world, it does not matter one bit that it is. Like that 1960's Ferrari, this film is a flawed work of art - a work of art of such beauty, of such soul, of such passion, of such magnificence, that the flaws shrink into utter insignificance for all but the most anal and prejudiced of viewers. I'm not going to describe it here - that would steal from it and I couldn't do it justice. Just watch it, and if you have even a drop of hot-blooded youth left in you at all, if you aren't completely mummified, the film will explain itself. Watch it in the dark, on a big screen, with a good sound system. The music, the costuming, the casting, the setting, the lighting... all of it has that special stamp of beauty and art and aesthetic that Italy has long been known for throughout the world.The only reason I was tempted to withhold the 5th star was for how many speeches, scenes and lines have been omitted. All the basics are there, of course. The big scenes are almost complete. But Franco Zefferelli was obviously doing his best to avoid overwhelming a non-Shakespeare-reading audience with the Bard's admittedly challenging words, words which have the ring of heaven's own stamp and which I wish were there in their entirety. Juliet's speech while she is waiting for Romeo in her bedroom and her speech before she takes the sleeping potion, for example, have both been omitted - much to the detriment of the story in my mind. Otherwise, the excellent Leonardo DeCaprio-Claire Danes film notwithstanding, this masterpiece from 1967 is still the gold standard and Olivia Hussey is still the unchallenged soul of Juliet in the hearts of most of the world.