Romeo and Juliet

In Baz Luhrmann’s film, the modern, “Romeo and Juliet”, various symbolic and imaginative spaces or places are featured to convey desire of characters. This desire may take several forms which will be examined in some detail further on. Luhrmann draws on post modern techniques which serve to make the possibly tragic film a richly allusive and open text within the framework of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Although Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” is basically a tragic love story, with fairly direct “messages” or “lessons” about the stupidity and danger of prejudice and the consequences of difference, Luhrmanns film, despite being criticised for its excision of over one third of the original dialogue, opens the text to radical interpretations of places of desire and difference. The role of the symbolic and imaginative spaces are so important due to the intensely “visual” nature of the film; the images, motifs and symbolic places work in junction with the...