Jason Zeldes directs a passion project about the lives of students who take a Shakespearean novel and adapt it to their own cultural understanding. Donté Clark introduces the movie by stating he didn’t think much of play Romeo & Juliet when he was at the age of 15; however, at his introduction of street violence and gun killings, by the age of 22, he understood how much the story related to his current lifestyle. With the talent group, RAW Talent, him and a group of other young people go about adapting the famous story, in the hopes it will send a message to the citizens of Richmond.

The movie is shot with an observational verité style, in that the director doesn’t involve himself with the content in the movie, outside parts with paragraphed text. All of the students tell their stories through interviews and on-site recordings, like raw unprepared videography, footage varying in quality. What I like about Romeo is Bleeding the most is it’s fast-cut, nicely capturing the uneasy and tension-filled environment the movie was shot in, and, how Ken Jaworowski from The New York Times puts it, “mimics the hip-hop and jazz-inflected rhythms of the student-poets.” What made it most effective for me, was it’s use of voice-overs from interviews over additional footage. There’s a number of great sequences that illustrate the gravity of a situation by using this technique, like the sequence when the Chevron plant blows and you hear voices play as footage of the incident happens. There was great editing here.

I will be honest, however, that I had no expectations for this at all and wasn’t interested in the topic the movie presented. Romeo & Juliet just happens to be my least favorite play written by William Shakespeare, and the idea of poor or unprivileged youth using poetry to fix their situation sounded like a pitch for another drama that everyone’s seen before. I just had no interest in seeing that story again. Luckily, Zeldes does manage to make a couple of intriguing sequences, mentioned previously. Another good one was when you find out Dante’s brother was shot and killed right as he got out of prison, and the scene plays out very seriously. There’s no music playing and only the sounds of typewriting can be heard as he’s documented that he was killed on the street. What the documentary needed was a little more of that. I appreciated that Zeldes wanted to get every side of the story, including the police, but the biggest struggle I had to overcome to get through the entire film was a lot of the undeveloped pieces in the middle, ultimately making large sections of the movie seem pointless. That made it difficult for me to get through the entire piece, already have the task of overcoming my disinterest in the bare concept.

What gave the finale a nice little bow was seeing the crowd enthusiastic about RAW Talent’s finished play and giving hope in the audience that the dire situation may be turned around. I could detail how I disagree politically with some of the arguments given, but the point of reviewing a movie like this is for it’s filmmaking. Romeo Is Bleeding does a decent job with it’s aesthetic raw quality and giving the viewer some great scenes, but overall, just feels like a mess at times. Watch it depending on how much you care about the topic.

Wrote this for Film Appreciation Class.