It begins not with a prologue spoken by an actor in a ruff, but with a newsreader on a television set, her face framed by static, announcing the woe of two star-cross'd lovers before the screen floods with images of civil strife. Within seconds, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, released thirty years ago this week, has told its audience that the rules of the classroom no longer apply. For many teenagers, Shakespeare's tragedy is the first door into Elizabethan English, easier to love than the austere machinations of Macbeth, Hamlet or Othello, with its plaintive lust and histrionic mood swings. Luhrmann, fresh from the success of Strictly Ballroom in 1992, kept the original verse but dropped it into a world that could only have been made in the nineties: grainy street footage, magazine headlines about capos and criminals, helicopters tracking car chases in a manner that recalled the media circus around the OJ Simpson pursuit two years earlier.

His feuding families became rival gangs with their own territory and economic operations, tapping an era's fascination with gangland, both as a source of art, from cinema to hip-hop, and as a conservative shorthand for supposedly intrinsic criminality. The look was as bold as the idea. Luhrmann and his wife, the costume designer Catherine Martin, imagined Verona as a sun-scorched beach city, filming in real places such as Mexico City's Immaculate Heart of Mary Church and Chapultepec Palace, and Boca del Río in Veracruz. The Montagues swaggered in open Hawaiian shirts; the Capulets, urban cowboys in Cuban-heeled boots, carried guns stamped with Catholic icons.

The camera spun and cut as though it, too, were in love, perhaps to compensate for verse that can feel impenetrable.