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Apart from Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet has been transposed to film more than any other of Shakespeare's plays. There have been some twenty film versions in a number of different languages, including Arabic and Hindi (Boyce 564). Prior to Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo+Juliet (1996), Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 screen version of the play stands out as a notable example of adaptation to the modern medium of film; but it is not particularly modern in interpretation-not minimalist, for example-and was criticized for its lavish mise-en-scène and fastidious aestheticism.1
Luhrmann's Romeo+Juliet, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in the leading roles, has been similarly disparaged, though not for a lack of modernity, but for what has been regarded by many critics as its postmodern excesses. Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times, complained that Shakespeare's dialogue is lost and upstaged by "pink hair, screaming billboards, tabloid television stories [and] music-video editing" and what she calls "the hyperkinetic vocabulary of post-modern kitsch." Robert Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, giving it only two stars, regarded the film as "a very bad idea. ... I have never seen anything remotely approaching the mess that the new punk version of Romeo and Juliet makes of Snakespeare's tragedy." Similarly, Desson Howe in The Washington Post accused Lunrmann of putting "Shakespeare's greatest Romance [sic] in a choke-hold" and of taking it "slam-dancing"; and Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly described the film as a "violent swank-trash video that may make you feel like reaching for the remote control."
While reviews have been plentiful, much less scholarly work has been undertaken on Luhrmann's postmodern adaptation of Snakespeare's play, though such as there is, and by contrast to the initial reviews, it has tended to evaluate the film favorably.2 A case in point is the article by Crystal Downing, "Misshapen Chaos of Well-Seeming Form: Baz Luhrmann's Romeo+Juliet," which takes its main title from Romeo's complaint to Benvolio Montague in Act 1, Scene 1, of the play in which, having been rejected by Rosaline, he muses on the emotional confusions caused by his frustrated love. Love, which had promised so much ("well-seeming form"), has not delivered, the result of which is emotional confusion ("Misshapen chaos"); hence the incongruous juxtapositions that follow: "Feather of lead, bright smoke,...