Romeo and Juliet

[pegkerr]

Fiona is studying Romeo and Juliet at school, and so this past Sunday for our family night I suggested we pull out the old VHS copy of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet and watch it. We broke halfway through and finished it tonight.

I adored that movie when I was Fiona's age. I first saw it, I think, at about the age of 8 or 9, and we had the LP with excerpts of the music and speeches. I listened to it over and over again, dozens, perhaps hundreds of times. I suppose it might have been the Titanic of my generation: beautiful young lovers, doomed love. It was the film that started my love of Shakespeare, which I have nurtured ever since. I became curious to know whatever happened to Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, and I did a web search and ran across this page. She looks astonishingly like her younger self, but oh my goodness, he is unrecognizable. Reading between the lines, the story of their lives since seems rather sad. One shining moment of beautiful youth, passion burning incandescent . . . and then the long slow years since then, when potential and beauty fades. If we are very lucky, however, we might have love to console us when the bloom of youth and beauty is gone.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

or possibly worse yet, be old, still lovely, and quite without love...
I think I'll go re-read the Portrait of Dorian Gray.

Perhaps I flatter myself. Or am being petulant and self-indulgent. Or both.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Olivia Hussey was utterly splendid in the Anthony Andrews IVANHOE (which I show my sixth graders every year--I bet the girls wuld adore it).

[aerden.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of that song from the movie:

A rose will bloom
and then must fade.
So does youth.
So does the fairest maid.

Shakespeare would probably want to hit me if he knew me. When I read Hamlet in high school, I concluded that the play's entire conflict could have been easilyresolved if the characters had only had access to a modern forensics lab.

I blame Quincy. (g)

Chantal

[satakieli.livejournal.com]

Of all the things you've said here, of course I choose to respond to the most banal. To my eyes, Mr. Whiting has aged very well. He's a handsome fellow, and those piercing blue eyes seem to have some strengh behind them now. Ms. Hussey, on the other hand, looks botoxed out of all human expression. I'd like to think that the incandescence of youthful passion (along with whatever admiribility one can find in it) is all tangled up in the fact that it ends. Love is better, stronger, and truer than adoration, and kindness and laughter beat an unlined forehead all hollow.

Of course, I say this from the grizzled head of a 23-year-old, so you may read into it sour grapes that my face has more lines than hers, or painfully earnest naivete and idealism; whichever you choose.

And my judgement is likely clouded by the fact that Romeo and Juliet is my least favorite Shakespeare by far. Here's to its effectiveness as a gateway drug, however!

[dreamflower]

When my son was in the ninth grade, he came in one day to find me watching a tape of that "Romeo and Juliet" which I had checked out from the local library for a bit of nostalgia. He came in on it near the beginning, and was of course, hooked by the sword-fight. So he sat down to watch it with me, and was enjoying it very much until it neared the end--and then--

Son:(Incredulous)"They *DIED*? Why didn't you tell me they *DIED*?"

Me: (Amused) "I thought you knew. I thought everyone knows that they die at the end."

Son: (Disgusted) "Well, that's just *DUMB*!"

[blazebox.livejournal.com]

:D! "Well, that's just *DUMB*!"

Here here!