Baz as a Bard man

OF the multitude of new information formats now dumped in our inboxes, the Google Alert is one of the more fascinating, if infuriating. Enter a search item, say Baz Luhrmann, and every day Google will send you any news items on the internet about him. Among the mountains of chaff, there can be revelations. Sifting through the endless references to his work something striking about the film director emerges. We tend to misrepresent him, or at least undervalue one of his films.

OF the multitude of new information formats now dumped in our inboxes, the Google Alert is one of the more fascinating, if infuriating. Enter a search item, say Baz Luhrmann, and every day Google will send you any news items on the internet about him. Among the mountains of chaff, there can be revelations. Sifting through the endless references to his work something striking about the film director emerges. We tend to misrepresent him, or at least undervalue one of his films.

Luhrmann is forever referred to as the maestro behind Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge!. Fine films both, but almost every day, somewhere across the world, a new article refers to the influence of his second feature film, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. Any reiteration of a Shakespeare play is inevitably compared to Luhrmann's. History has treated it well.

But the dual Academy Award winner and Catherine Martin, his wife and creative partner, seem to be suffering the same anonymous fate as this country's only triple Oscar winner, Orry-Kelly, who won awards for his costume design for Gypsy, Some Like it Hot and An American in Paris. And he was Cary Grant's New York flatmate. You've probably never heard of him.

Martin received Romeo + Juliet's only Oscar nomination, for art direction; she was responsible for the film's indelible image of the lovers spying each other through the fluorescent fish tank. Her influence can't be understated.

Luhrmann and Martin's 1996 collaboration is the forgotten sibling in their Red Curtain Trilogy but its impact continues to resonate louder than that of Moulin Rouge! or Strictly Ballroom. (Incidentally, at a practical level, Luhrmann's shrewd licensing of the film's hugely successful soundtracks established him financially and enabled him to concentrate on his artistic visions.)

Artistically, its influence is far more important, though. It has become one of the few Shakespeare films to transcend cinema's otherwise stodgy adaptations of the greatest playwright's work. Yet Romeo + Juliet rarely receives the kudos it deserves.

The recent British publication of Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century is typical of the blase attitude many have to Luhrmann's most wholly realised work. The academic treatise, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and Roman Wray, devotes chapters to such piffle as The Maori Merchant of Venice, Don Boyd's My Kingdom and Stage Beauty, among others, but not to Luhrmann's adaptation. Yet all the book's contributors refer to the dashing film. It is the talisman of modern Shakespeare, but referred to only grudgingly.

The film was a commercial success on its US release but Luhrmann's kinetic delivery - which reviewers derisively referred to as "MTV-style", as if MTV was still a cutting-edge cultural force - infuriated critics. Just as Moulin Rouge! would do years later.

Film adaptations of Shakespeare's canon are hardly novel. There have been more than 40 screen adaptations of Hamlet alone. There were even adaptations of the Bard's work during the silent era. So Luhrmann wasn't treading virgin ground. Indeed, Shakespeare's work continues to be adapted, re-engineered or bowdlerised to varying degrees of competency. These misjudged reinterpretations clutter our screens and stages because the cultural imperative to keep Shakespeare relevant holds firm.

The BBC's recent TV series Shakespeare Retold was cloyingly desperate in its use of modern concepts to freshen up the Bard. Recasting Macbeth as a celebrity chef in one episode said more about our inane culture, and more quickly, than could be said in a sonnet. But it added nothing to Macbeth. Australia's Bell Shakespeare company has also struggled in recent times to present an exciting new context for his plays on stage.

Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet was striking. And contemporary, which was half its problem. The best Shakespeare film adaptations have been "classic" interpretations: Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, Henry V, Othello or Richard III, Richard Burton as Hamlet, Orson Welles as Othello. No tricky new future proofing in those versions, nothing to outrage critics raised on the pure iambic pentameter. Luhrmann and co-screenwriter Craig Pearce's transposition of the Capulets and the Montagues to a modern-day gang setting didn't fawn in the romantic - or should that be traditional? - style of Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet.

Nor did it veer far enough away from the conventional Romeo and Juliet tales as seen in disparate reimaginings such as West Side Story and 10 Things I Hate About You (a 1999 high school riff on The Taming of the Shrew). Those films were far enough removed from Shakespeare to have their liberties excused.

I sense that much of the reason Luhrmann was buffeted by the critics at the time was because he dared to maintain the integrity, largely, of Shakespeare's dialogue. Zeffirelli protected his young leads, 15-year-old Olivia Hussey and 17-year-old Leonard Whiting, from much of the tricky dialogue, but Luhrmann threw newcomers Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes into the tempest, daring them to drag a younger audience into the story with them. No apologies; no compromises. But everything Luhrmann gave his film clashed with the perceived image of the loved tale. It was meant to be poetic and touching, not rambunctious and coarse. Shakespeare was meant be revered, not retooled.

Today, it appears to have been accepted as the finest modern example of Shakespeare on film. Many will argue the toss. Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing is sweet, Richard III starring Ian McKellen is powerful and Julie Taymor's Titus is diverting.

Nor is Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet the perfect film. It's just the best modern Shakespeare.