Romeo and Juli­et (1968)

“Each night I ask the stars up above / why must I be a teenag­er in love?” Dion and the Bel­monts weren’t the first to con­nect trag­ic young love and the pow­er of the night sky. Shakespeare’s char­ac­ters, when not sharp­en­ing dag­gers, are most often dream­ing with eyes turned sky­ward, and four hun­dred years before doo-wop Romeo and Juliet‘s fatal crush was also imag­ined as prop­er­ly cos­mic in scale.

There’s a high school vibe to Fran­co Zeffirelli’s 1968 opu­lent but tra­di­tion­al telling of the Romeo and Juli­et tale, and not just because it’s the ver­sion most like­ly to be screened in an Eng­lish class. The char­ac­ters sneak between bed­rooms and par­ties, behind the backs of an unjust, uncar­ing adult world. ​“Punk ram­pant” Mer­cu­tio (John McEnery) is the pro­to­typ­i­cal com­ic side­kick, and his ban­ter with super-jock Tybalt (Michael York) is played here for all its goofy poten­tial. But it’s the film’s sense of star­lit melo­dra­ma that real­ly finds an affin­i­ty with the high-school­er imagination.

The sets are tight and stagey, every cor­ner is dec­o­rat­ed with baroque lush­ness, every shot framed by a vel­vet cur­tain or sil­very branch. And the dia­logue isn’t caged in by any attempts at nat­u­ral­ism. Leads Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whit­ing bring out the humour in the elab­o­rate rhetor­i­cal games they dance around each oth­er, like the ten­ta­tive back and forth of prom night.

All this sneak­ing around is always ​“at pain of death.” The dra­ma plays out on a stage of mor­tal dimen­sions, the only one that can fit their emo­tion­al extremes. But the threat hangs in the back­ground like pure set dress­ing. Unlike the brash and shiny men­ace of Baz Luhrmann’s West Coast mur­der cap­i­tal vision of Verona, the sword­play feels no more lethal than the insults they fling at each oth­er. They’re just fooling.

So when the first blood appears on screen, the char­ac­ters in fair Verona feel the shock of a game gone too far. And it’s after this that the melo­dra­ma that felt so fit­ting for the dreamy yearn­ing of the pre­vi­ous scenes starts to grate. When attempt­ing tragedy, it becomes pantomime.