Zeffirelli’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ · LRB 2 February 2023

Franco Zeffirelli​ stated of his 1968 movie Romeo and Juliet, now about to seem in a digital restoration by the Criterion Assortment, that he wished it to inform ‘an actual story in a believable medieval metropolis’. An off-the-cuff comment, little question, however one which invitations interpretations or {qualifications}. An actual story will not be the identical as a practical story, the characters and costumes look a little bit late for the Center Ages, and the town is greater than believable, since a lot of the movie was shot on location in Italy.

The film wears effectively, and is actually higher than I remembered, however time has additionally made it a unique movie, in sure methods nearer to Shakespeare than it was once or was in all probability meant to be. Or nearer to a sure Shakespeare, the one who loves horrible jokes and cheerfully permits them to accompany violence and misery. When Romeo and Juliet was first revealed, in 1597, some two or three years after it was written, it was described as ‘a wonderful immodest tragedy’ – the place ‘immodest’ means filled with improbable ideas and expressions, however may simply apply to a lot of the characters, maybe all of them besides the hero and heroine. The second publication, in 1599, had the title The Most Glorious and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Zeffirelli’s movie reveals us that these two adjectives can get together with one another improbably effectively.

The opening and shutting of the movie are extra snug than something in it. We hear the uncredited voice of Laurence Olivier talking the primary phrases of the play’s refrain, telling us about star-crossed lovers and what’s going to occur, after which on the finish he borrows the phrases of the Prince of Verona. Olivier’s supply isn’t overdramatic however it indicators some kind of cultural institution, as if supposed to border a sober manufacturing of a traditional relatively than, say, a model of West Facet Story, with believable streets filled with quarrelling gangs. There are particular slippages within the language. The prologue means that the lovers ‘do with their dying bury their mother and father’ strife’, whereas the movie’s implication is that nothing is buried right here besides two our bodies. And on the finish of the play the Prince says of ‘the glooming peace’ they’ve achieved that ‘Some shall be pardoned, and a few punishèd.’ Within the movie Robert Stephens because the Prince convincingly says: ‘All are punishèd.’ Justice will not be what’s to come back: it’s what they’re miserably dwelling with.

The streets of the town are very busy within the movie, and the partitions and piazzas and church buildings appear to get pleasure from their film life. In an essay on Zeffirelli, Ramona Wray writes of ‘giddy, delirious digital camera work’. The gangs on the streets are doubly wearing fancy garments, as soon as as a result of that is Shakespeare and as soon as as a result of they deal with life itself as a loud occasion. Until we expect they’re characters from Renaissance work who’ve escaped their frames with the intention to have an excellent time. There may be some atmospheric music within the soundtrack by Nino Rota, and we surprise for some time if the film isn’t going to incorporate just a few songs, and so sound in addition to appear like West Facet Story. Simply when we have now determined this isn’t the place we’re going, the movie pauses in the course of a bash on the Capulet home, and a personality does sing a tune. Many will recognise the tune: the tune grew to become referred to as ‘A Time for Us’, and was recorded for orchestra by Henry Mancini and later sung by Shirley Bassey, Andy Williams and plenty of others. Time appears to be operating backwards for us: the movie is haunted by later echoes of what it began. I don’t know the place this leaves us, however it’s clear that Rota’s music, all through the movie, is doing numerous the work of Shakespeare’s puns and rhymes.

The occasion is the place the place Romeo and Juliet meet and fall in love. Neither is aware of who the opposite is, and every is shaken by the information that the opposite belongs to an enemy household. The balcony scene follows and is visually very ingenious. Juliet runs up and down her terrace, Romeo dangles from a tree, and so they say their too acquainted strains with out extreme operatic inflation.

A recurring criticism on the time of the movie’s first look involved the scarcity of phrases – solely one thing like a 3rd of Shakespeare’s textual content made it into the soundtrack. This objection now looks as if a relatively stodgy piety, and maybe would have appeared so then if we had thought extra about movie. Such a view underestimates how a lot a well-filmed face or gesture can say, not recognising that it could in truth say precisely what the phrases had been saying, and say it higher. A fantastic instance of this risk is Visconti’s sustained studying of Dirk Bogarde’s face in Loss of life in Venice, however there are some good moments in Romeo and Juliet too. I’m considering particularly of the set-up in direction of the tip of the movie, when Romeo has killed Juliet’s cousin Tybalt (Michael York). He’s already (secretly) married to Juliet, and can now be banned from Verona for his misdeed. Her mother and father, in the meantime, are continuing with their plan to marry her to Rely Paris, and even her nurse recommends that she go together with that plan, as a result of Romeo received’t be coming again and it’s the wise factor to do. Juliet scarcely speaks throughout this sequence, however there’s a second once we get lengthy close-ups of her face because the others speak. Might she be determined sufficient to collapse to widespread sense? The face doesn’t reply this or some other query instantly. It’s simply frozen, scared. Then we realise that its immobility represents a type of dedication, a thoughts made up. We had been misreading its calm. She was by no means going to accept the squalid compromise. There may be after all an indignant irony in her saying to her nurse: ‘Thou hast comforted me marvellous a lot.’ However there’s that and extra in her face.

One other benefit of movie is that the photographed actors are actual even when their characters are fictive – simply because the pictured metropolis partitions exist in actual cities. Zeffirelli’s employment of this aspect is splendidly efficient within the late scene in a vault, the place Juliet is meant to be lifeless. She’s going to return to consciousness quickly. Romeo doesn’t know this – he didn’t get the memo that was supposed to tell him of Friar Laurence’s crafty plot. Juliet would get out of her marriage to Paris as a result of she regarded lifeless, Romeo would meet up along with her and take her away.

The extravagant visible recreation is already current in Shakespeare, however is richly enhanced by the truth that we’re seeing what Romeo sees. He doesn’t doubt for a second that Juliet is lifeless, however simply can’t recover from how she appears to be like. ‘Loss of life … hath had no energy but upon thy magnificence,’ he says, and

Ah, expensive Juliet,
Why artwork thou but so truthful? Shall I consider
That unsubstantial dying is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster retains
Thee right here in darkish to be his paramour?

It’s as if he’s had a glimpse of how Gothic novels work or why lamentable plights make such good literature. And naturally we too get the identical glimpse throughout altering strains of sight. We see the true actress pretending to be drugged however wanting lifeless. We all know she will not be lifeless within the story, however we additionally know why Romeo is deceived. Like so many good films this one is inviting us to consider what it means to see, and what else we could must do to grasp our world.