Summary
Night has fallen, and fireworks explode across the sky. We see Juliet in an angel costume on the balcony of the Capulet mansion, wistfully watching the firecrackers explode. The mansion is now fully decorated with fairy lights, streaming red banners, and illuminated fountains, ready for the denizens of Verona to arrive. Also watching the fireworks is Romeo, who is in costume as well, dressed as a medieval knight. Romeo is still beachside with the Montague boys (Sampson and Gregory) at Sycamore Grove, who are wearing hats with devil horns, recklessly playing with their firearms and drunkenly causing havoc.
A car suddenly peals up with a license plate that reads, "MERCUTIO," accompanied by a fanfare of disco music. An African-American man is in the driver's seat, applying lipstick and laughing raucously toward the other Montague boys. As he steps out of the car, we see he is wearing silver, glittery heels. A wider shot reveals that he is dressed fully in women's clothing—a glittery, sequined short skirt, bustier bra, and white afro wig. Mercutio playfully begins handing out the invitations to the Capulet party to all the Montague boys, while suggestively dancing and pulling the invitations out of various parts of his outfit. He dances on the Sycamore Grove proscenium with the other Montague boys while watching the fireworks continue to explode.
Mercutio thrusts his body in Romeo's direction and pulls an invitation out of his crotch, making Romeo laugh. The invitation reads: "CAPULET - Invitation to a Costume Feast - Mercutio and Friends." Mercutio urges Romeo to dance with him, but Romeo refuses, maintaining that he has a "soul of lead," and is weighed down by "love's heavy burden." Mercutio advises Romeo to fight back against love, and playfully throws him into a headlock, trying to carry him away. Romeo breaks free, irritated and stubborn, and says he had a dream that caused his depressed mood. Mercutio retorts that he had a dream, too, in which it was revealed to him that "dreamers often lie."
Mercutio then embarks on his most famous speech in the play—the "Queen Mab" monologue, in which he expounds upon the alternately deranging and euphoric effects of dreams and fantasies on the human mind. As he does so, Mercutio takes out a small box, which seemingly contains a ring. As he explains that Queen Mab takes a form "no bigger than an agate stone on the fore-finger of an alderman," he reveals what is actually in the box—a tablet of the drug ecstasy, pressed to his index finger. The tablet has a red heart with an arrow shooting through it. Mercutio works himself up into a fury over the course of the speech, carried away by his own intensity, until Romeo intervenes in order to calm him down. Benvolio impatiently urges that they go to the party.
Before that happens, Romeo is suddenly struck with an ominous, portentous feeling—a "consequence hanging in the stars." Casting his eyes toward the sky, Romeo begins to describe the fearful feeling that has gripped him. As he does so, the film flashes forward to the final scene, in which Romeo will slowly approach Juliet in a chapel lined with candles and neon blue crosses. Romeo pleads with the fates to "direct his sail," and guide him away from the disasters that have already been foretold to the audience. With that, Romeo takes the ecstasy pill and surrenders to the bacchanalia of the evening.
As he does, the camera zooms into Romeo's eye and shows a frenzy of spiraling carnival lights and sparklers. We see Mercutio standing in the Montague convertible, which rotates around in slow-motion on an axis, as he sings a cover of "Young Hearts Run Free" by Candi Staton. Subtitles reveal to the viewer that "The party begins at Capulet Mansion." Romeo, now under the influence of ecstasy, shows his invitation to the Capulet mansion security guard, having donned his silver masquerade mask. We see Gloria dancing with and kissing Tybalt and Gregory and Sampson misbehaving. Romeo hallucinates Tybalt, who is dressed up like the devil, roaring like an otherworldly demon. A dizzy Romeo says, "drugs are quick," his penultimate line of the play after taking the apothecary's poison, which Luhrmann choose to playfully re-appropriate here.
Mercutio then breaks into an over-the-top musical performance on the staircase landing of the Capulet mansion, replete with a spotlight and background dancers, delivering a full rendition of "Young Hearts Run Free" for all the party guests. Fulgencio happens upon and drunkenly slurs into Romeo's ear, not realizing who he is, and also begins to sing himself. Romeo becomes increasingly light-headed, veering across the screen as if trying to regain his balance. Finally, his eyes shut tight and he awakens with his face plunged into a sink full of cold water, an exact replica of the viewer's first glimpse of Juliet.
Analysis
Mercutio is a character who in Shakespeare's play embodies a number of qualities: innocence, fantasy, bacchanalia, wit, pleasure, sensuality. In Luhrmann's film, he is reinvented as an African-American drag queen beloved by Montagues and Capulets alike. He is one of the few characters in the play who is neither partial nor loyal to either clique, although he reserves a certain fondness and concern for Romeo. Turning Mercutio into a drag performer highlights his playful and performative approach to gender and sexuality, and indeed, to life itself—Mercutio is constantly encouraging Romeo to dance, celebrate, and embrace life's surface-level pleasures, in an effort to shake him out of his depressed, lovelorn state.
Luhrmann uses Mercutio's queer aesthetic—defined by disco music, glittery clothing, and theatricality—to shape the mise-en-scene of the entire Capulet masquerade ball, as well as draw out an implicit theme on which many Shakespearean scholars have commented, namely the erotic tension between Mercutio and Romeo. The physical intimacy of their platonic, male homosocial bonding is emphasized, as Mercutio is seen teasing, taunting, wrestling, and dancing with Romeo throughout the story. Mercutio is shown to be not only a friend but a kind of mentor to Romeo, counseling him and looking after his best interests, and he is perhaps the only one who can make him laugh, as he does here when he advises that Romeo learn how to dance and be happy again (literally giving him "ecstasy") after his heartbreak over Rosaline.
Mercutio's introductory scene is saturated in blue, the first major instance of many highly symbolic uses of the color blue over the course of the film. The film's cinematographer, Donald M. McAlpine, uses blue to symbolize a number of notions—tragedy, premonition, death, dreams, and the the unknown—that contrast with red and images of fire, used to capture and emphasize the fiery passions and acts of here and the now. The two primary elements of this scene that occasion blue are Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech (a manifesto on the power and effects of dreams and magic), and Romeo's portentous feeling about the events about to befall him. The color blue bridges this scene to the final scene of the film, which is presented in a flash-forward initiated by Romeo's premonition.
Once the Capulet party scene begins, the color red becomes the dominant hue, placed in various contexts—exploding fireworks, neon signs, painted walls, banners, spotlights, Tybalt's horns, Mercutio's lipstick—to denote the raging passions and desires let loose for the occasion. The song Mercutio sings, "Young Hearts Run Free," is in fact a cautionary one that reflect's the play's themes about the dangers of succumbing too readily or excessively to passion and desire: "Don't be no fool / Love really don't love you." The incestuous glimpse of Gloria Capulet and Tybalt kissing signals an instance of passion unbound, as do Fulgencio's licentious comments to Romeo. The scene ultimately serves to represent the thematic intersection between decadent pleasure and moral turpitude.
The unique visual effect used to emphasize Romeo's dizziness was achieved by placing the camera and the actor on a single dollying platform, so that it looks like Romeo is floating across the room. This kind of non-traditional camerawork, along with the use non-diegetic music (such as the deep, beast-like roar that Tybalt emits), reflect Romeo's hallucinations while under the influence of the drugs, which only heighten the chaos of the party further. When Romeo finally loses consciousness and awakens with his face in a pool of water, the shot exactly parallels the film's first shot of Juliet, foreshadowing the fact that she will appear, and the two will soon meet.
