Wherefore

The Verona project, part VII, Rome & Juliet

Who (how old), when, how long? Mylene Dizon (29) and Andrea Del Rosario (about the same, I guess; turns out she's an international model who has appeared on the cover of Maxim, but she's apparently secretive about her age), 2006, 2¼hr.

What sort of R&J?Filipina lesbians. As it turns out, this is scarcely a riff on Shakespeare's play at all. Aside from the names of the protagonists (whose love is not star-crossed, only culture-crossed), the only connections to R&J I noticed were (1) the line, spoken by Rome of Juliet, "She speaks"; (2) a crucially misdirected message of sorts; (3) a late scene in a cemetery; and (4) Juliet in a death-seeming coma near the end.

Seriocomic scale for first scene?As is the case with most of the rote questions, there's no analogue in this film.

"Wherefore": do the film/playmakers know what it means? --

Carrion flies? --

Body count? Juliet's father (Flores, not Capulet--an interesting choice of names, since it's Rome's occupation as a wedding planner [including, of course, flower choices] that sets the plot turning), disabled apparently by a stroke since before the start of the action, suffers a fatal heart attack, apparently in response to the discovery of Juliet's relationship with a woman, or (I'm inclined to see it this way) in response to his wife's hysterical response to that discovery. Nobody else dies, but as suggested above, Juliet flirts w/ death.

What (else) is missing? Let's just wrap everything up here: it would be easy to dismiss this as a badly written parable of intolerance, with grotesquely bad interludes of junior-high-level "poetry" and with sound that sometimes seems to have been recorded on a portable cassette player. That would not be incorrect, but it would be incomplete. For one thing, as bad as the sound is, the camerawork is that good: it has as lush a look as the best indies I've seen. More to the point, if by "badly written" you mean pedestrian language, yes, definitely (and even though it's about 75% subtitled Tagalog, there's enough English for me to feel pretty confident in that assessment). But if you mean badly plotted and predictable, well, not so fast. And if you mean lacking in any sort of intellectual or emotional appeal worth appealing, no, I'd say not. The setting of the story in a weirdly Catholic culture distances the theme of intolerance from 2008 California and Arkansas, say, but in doing do provides a useful perspective. To have a character ask what's so damned wrong with loving whom your heart tells you to love, and why people can't accept that, and why God can't accept that--well, that may seem pretty simplistic, but really, do you have a better way of articulating the question? I didn't love the film, and I doubt I'd ever see it again, but it choked me up once or twice, and that I did not expect.

What (else) is changed? --

What (else) is odd? --

End-of-the-play exposition? --