Strictly Ballroom Baz Luhrmann

In this essay, I will write about the evolution of Baz Luhrmann as a director and how he has used post-modern film techniques to better portray his ideas, with all divides broken down in order to create something that goes against the “norms” society, specifically through three films. Luhrmann creates an artificial sense of naturalism by exaggerating everything, thereby evening out the exaggerations of all of his other depictions.

The first fil that I will be writing about is “Strictly Ballroom”, one of three films featuring in Luhrmann’s “Red Curtain Trilogy” all of which feature an actual red curtain in each of their opening sequences. The opening sequence of “Strictly Ballroom” shows medium shots of the silhouettes of dancers, with “The
The opening sequence of this film starts with a news reporter on a television quoting Shakespeare’s prologue to his play, when the camera suddenly zip-zooms in on the screen, images start to flash on the screen through the use of continuous jump cuts throughout this montage. The next frame shows three young men driving down the highway screaming, they are introduced to us simply as “The Montague Boys”, and they stop at a petrol station where they meet “The Capulet Boys” and Tybalt who has some sort of a stylised, Latin feel to his character, seemingly a reference to “Strictly Ballroom’s” eccentricities. All of the above mentioned characters start to attack one another in the petrol station, whilst talking in Shakespearean English, using direct quotes from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, this could be referred to as a pastiche, meaning that Baz Luhrmann has decided to reference a previously created art form (being Shakespeare’s plays) and almost seems to pay tribute to them through the use of his script (which is similar to Shakespeare’s original play scripts). Luhrmann once again explores the theme of young versus old, the young are, once again, triumphant, however they pay the ultimate price at the end of the film. Romeo and Juliet decide to disobey all orders from their parents and all of the suggestions from their friends and closest helpers and decided to marry each other in secret (the triumph), but through one small flaw in their plan to run away together, both Romeo and Juliet end up dead (the