Little stars...

I was either fifteen or fourteen the first time I read Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. I had about two years before I would see Baz Luhrmann's film with my then boyfriend, who didn't quite understand why I was so distraught by the film, especially since I was no DiCaprio swooner. The fact of the matter was that just months before I saw the film, I had been through some pretty perilous breakups, and the ideas of romantic suicide, families that hate each other, and even the idea of being star-crossed, all appealed to me and reached the inner, dusky corners of my mind and heart. Rereading the play almost fifteen years later has given me a different vantage point, and I identify more with Mercutio, and Friar Laurence, than say, Romeo or Juliet, but somehow their young love and fierce passion still move me, even to tears.

I have been, probably to the detriment of my learning experience, watching the film as I read, pausing to read the lines that the film skips or delivers out of character or scene. This film is still pretty darn good. Mercutio is expertly played by Harold Perrineau, now of Lost fame, and I really love Clare Danes' portrayal of Juliet. She embodies her as I interpret her from the text; she is witty, and the cleverer of the two young lovers. Her innocence and virginity, so often brought up in the text by her blushing cheek, is balanced by a strong sense of who she is and being true to who she loves, even at the cost of losing her family. Her father's tirade at her, and her mother's dismissal, is crushing in the text, and Danes' is so good at teenage angst that she takes Juliet's despair to very strong, but very realistic level. When she pulls the small pistol from her purse and screams at the Friar that he better hurry up and tell her an answer, because she "longs to die," my heart just breaks for this young girl who seems to see no other way out, and has been spurned by the people she should trust with her life.

Shakespeare seems to have a penchant for rage between father and daughters over marriage. Hero's father, in Much Ado About Nothing, tells her that if she has been sleeping around, and is ineligable to marry Claudio that he would like to kill her, and calls her all sorts of slurs. Capulet similarly yells at his daughter that if she doesn't do as he says and marry Paris, that he would watch her starving, begging in the streets with a blind and callus eye. He calls her a harlot, and tells her never to speak to him again. There is some sort of strange connection between these future sons in law and fathers in law. They are marrying off their only daughters, but they have more of a connection with these idiots than their own valuable daughters; Hero and Juliet are far wiser than their years and experience alone.

At any rate, Shakespeare repeats themes and patterns and even names, in his excellent plays. I don't think the film could move me without his direct dialogue; while it's a pretty movie, it it firmly rooted in Shakespearian sound, and tone. I have yet to watch the church scene, with the glowing blue crosses. It makes me weep. Perhaps it is good to read this play at around the ages the main characters are supposed to be. It is good for depressed young people to know they are not alone, nor have they been alone for hundreds of years. In mourning Romeo and Juliet, perhaps they put off mourning themselves.