In 1996, Australian director Baz Luhrmann premiered his version of the tragedy Romeo and Juliet, written by William Shakespeare in 1597. It was a major box office success and departed from the usual trend of revising such plays with the aim of creating a historical reconstruction of the events recounted in the original work. Instead, Luhrmann chose to transport the action to the present day, but without altering Shakespeare's original text. He reinterpreted what could be called 1990s urban culture. It places the characters in a mixed-race city in North America, where all kinds of ethnicities mix with their respective musical and gestural manifestations, even their way of dressing, bearing witness to a new kind of frontier culture, which speaks English, without being purely Anglo, although the drama they represent is that of the great British writer par excellence, William Shakespeare.

With his version of the Elizabethan classic, ROMEO AND JULIET, Baz Luhrmann understands and accepts that, for the most part, audiences respond to primal needs. Thus, scenes of violence, as well as those with erotic undertones or intense emotional charge, are usually the most striking. Although the essence of Shakespeare's tragedy is first love, it is set within a violent and conflict-ridden context. In Shakespeare, aggression manifests itself in language as well as in the use of swords and daggers; in Luhrmann's version, the language remains, and the sharp steel is replaced by pistols. Luhrmann understands that to connect with a late 20th-century audience, he must translate the action to contemporary times, but not the words written by the English author. He assumes, then, that the archaic element lies in the gestures and appearances, not in the oral delivery of the play.

That's why the film invests immense effort in art direction and production design. It's the film's appearance, its context, that needs updating, not the script. Filmgoers in '96 saw how an Australian, better than anyone else, interpreted the blend that emerged from the coexistence of Anglos, Latin Americans, and Afro-descendants. Luhrmann stylizes, and there's no doubt that his work is almost documentary and photographic. His film understands, like no other, teenagers experiencing first love, those of the 14th century and those of the 20th, and expresses it with the same words, but in different worlds.

With ROMEO AND JULIET, Baz Luhrmann excels as a director because he communicates and expresses without either activity losing importance. He communicates because he follows Shakespeare's structure without prejudice; by embracing it, he is free to experiment with the staging without compromising the narrative or the clarity of the actions. He expresses insofar as he belongs to his time and is aware of it. Therefore, he understands cultural syncretism and manifests it aesthetically, almost reaching the level of anthropological cinema, through fiction.