Romeo + Julieta

I remember that the first time I saw Romeo + Juliet was 13 years old and I had already read Shakespeare's novel.  Personally I had not been fascinated by the book, but the screenplay of this film blew my mind.  In those years I did not know Baz Luhrmann, director of the film,   but the richness of the images and his baroque and grotesque style, made me fall in love with his work after seeing this film in which he maintained the essential romance of the characters but modified the character’s context, making the Capuletos and Montescos families a gang of thugs that confront through the territory of "Verona Beach" a city that would be the mix between Miami and a typical city in Mexico such as Monterrey or Mexico City.

I have always considered myself a person who focuses on the aesthetics of the movies, that's why I love classic films that maintain an essence that is very difficult to see in today's cinema, although I must admit that Romeo + Julieta is not at all  a classic film, although its script is, its aesthetic is totally contemporary.  A film so well thought on an aesthetic level that I personally think it’s made to never take your eyes off of it. Its neon lights, its Mexican colors and aesthetics and its intentionally chosen wardrobe are some of the highlights of this film, which  has great performances by Leonardo Dicaprio (Romeo), Claire Danes (Juliet), Harold Perrineau (Mercury) and John Leguizamo (Theobald).

                   

The scene I love most about this film is the party in which Romeo + Julieta is known, since the decision of the director to make it a hidden costume party is a sense of reflecting the essence of each character, positioning Julieta as a virginal angel, Romeo as a knight, Theobald as the devil and Mercury as a transvestite, subliminally inscribed on the scene the perception of the characters that the director had. Plus I find fascinating that all the verses that Romeo utters before and during the party are justified by the fact that Mercury gave him an LSD before going to sneak into the event of the Capulets.