Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows a suicidal Juliet meeting with her priest and confidante Father Laurence, who tells her his plan to prevent her marriage to Paris. Juliet is distraught because her lover Romeo has been exiled, and she turns her gun on the priest. He dissuades her, takes the gun, and persuades her to feign her own death by drinking a potion that will put her into a deathlike sleep. Here, Father Laurence is foregrounded while images showing the successful outcome of the plan are shown behind him. The clip ends with a close-up of Juliet accepting the vial of potion.

Educational value points

• This clip from the film Romeo + Juliet is imbued with risk taking, misunderstandings and an ominous sense of disaster, common themes in Shakespearean tragedies. Father Laurence (Pete Postlethwaite) presents the despairing Juliet (Clare Danes) with his intricate and risky plot for her to feign death with a drug on the morning of her wedding to Paris.

• The clip reveals the significant role of the priest in the lives of Romeo and Juliet. They confide their innermost feelings to him, and the plan he devises for them becomes a turning point in the drama. When Juliet screams ‘Be not so long to speak, I long to die’, she reveals her despair at the idea of facing life without Romeo. Her unconditional trust in the priest is suggested when she contemplates the vial of potion he hands to her.

• Luhrmann uses contemporary props and popular culture references to connect today’s audience with Shakespeare’s text. In her anguish, Juliet, dressed in a black beret, short tunic and gloves, presses a pistol (in the original play, a knife) to her head, giving this moment in the drama a modern feel. Father Laurence is shown planning to deliver the details of his plan to Romeo ‘poste haste’ via a modern post packet. This is a stylish wry play on Shakespeare’s dialogue.

• Luhrmann uses the technique of simultaneously showing and telling key aspects of the drama. A ‘crystal ball’ effect is created through the foregrounded image of Father Laurence, who unveils his plan directly to camera while scenes representing the content of his speech are shown behind him. The scenes include Juliet lying apparently dead (in ‘borrow’d likeness of shrunk death’), her ‘funeral’, Romeo receiving news of the plan and their reunion.

• This clip indicates the skilful direction for which Baz Luhrmann won the Alfred Bauer Award at the 1997 Berlin International Film Festival and the 51st BAFTA David Lean Award. Luhrmann and Craig Pearce also won the BAFTA for the Best Adapted Screenplay (1998). Romeo + Juliet was highly successful at the box office, grossing $147 million worldwide.