In
important ways, Luhrmann's film tries to capture the "feel" of Shakespeare's plays.
One of this director's talents is to see beneath the surface plot to ways in which a story is
constructed, reproducing the intensity a work may have conveyed in its original iteration. In
doing that, he necessarily changes some aspects of the story's conventional understanding. In
his The Great Gatsby, for instance, he uses the most
up-to-date music in order to underscore the Jazz Age's rhythm. It isn't historically accurate,
but it is tonally appropriate.
The updating in serves a
similar purpose. The Los Angeles gang context places Shakespeare's romance within the context of
irrational social strife. The improbability ofandchoosing each other is thus intensified by the
very real danger their context creates. In the movie, Luhrmann has so much more to work with in
terms of setting and props, and this can stand in for the work that language must play on a more
barren stage. The...
No comments:
Post a Comment