‘By any other name’?
NOTE: this article potentially contains mild spoilers for Claudio Giovannesi’s 2019 film Piranhas. If you’d rather not know anything about the film’s plot, you may want to watch Piranhas first before you continue reading.
I recently watched Claudio Giovannesi’s La paranza dei bambini, screened at the London Film Festival under its English title Piranhas. The LFF website describes the film as ‘[a] teenage Scarface meets Romeo and Juliet’¹ — a selling point which, as a fan of Shakespearean cinema, immediately caught my eye. It’s a tried and tested marketing formula: get people interested in little-known thing X by describing it as a blend of thing Y and thing Z, both of which are well-respected and instantly recognisable. The echoes of Brian De Palma’s iconic 1983 gangster flick are relatively easy to see: fifteen-year-old Nicola (Francesco Di Napoli) climbs the ranks of the criminal underworld of Naples through sheer determination and ambition in a manner quietly reminiscent of Al Pacino’s Tony Montana.
The parallels with Shakespeare’s play, however, are less certain. Piranhas does feature a teenage love story between Nicola and Letizia (Viviana Aprea), and the pair do eventually find themselves separated thanks to the young gangster’s chosen way of life. A tragic development late in the final act potentially leaves Nicola in a position not dissimilar to that of Romeo at the end of Act 3 Scene 1; but as Giovannesi leaves the matter intentionally open-ended, this is, at least partially, speculative on the part of the audience.
Michael Anderegg describes film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet as ‘a subgenre of the Shakespeare film, each version commenting on an earlier one, each working against the original flow of the play to draw on Shakespeare’s construction of scenes and moments that virtually demand comparative treatment’.¹ I agree with Anderegg’s identification of Romeo and Juliet films as now being their own subgenre (perhaps Hamlet is the only other Shakespeare play that could lay claim to such categorisation) but it’s his assertion that film adaptations ‘[work] against the original flow of the play’ that is pertinent here. How much Romeo and Juliet does a story have to have in order to qualify as an adaptation or appropriation? There are numerous examples of films and other works based upon Shakespeare’s play which undo the lovers’ double suicide and give them a happy ending, suggesting the story no longer needs to be a tragedy in order to qualify. Both Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies and Kelly Asbury’s Gnomeo & Juliet immediately spring to mind as relatively recent cinematic examples.
So, what else can be lost? The warring families? The escalation of violence? Capulet’s comedy servants — okay, they can probably be safely excised. I don’t have an answer, but I’m inclined to believe that if one element can be left on the cutting room floor then anything else can be. But is there a point at which an adaptation has either changed or cut enough of the work upon which it’s based, that it’s no longer worthy of consideration as an adaptation at all? Again, I don’t have an answer. But, as my research is based within Adaptation Studies just as much as it is Film Studies and Shakespeare Studies, it’s a question I think about a lot.
So, what of Piranhas? I’ve yet to find anything to suggest that Giovannesi consciously made his film as a Romeo and Juliet story. Personally, I don’t think there’s enough within the film to regard it as even loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s play. The young love story is a relatively minor (and underdeveloped) element of the narrative, and the escalation of violence and occasional tragedy seen throughout the main plot can far more closely be related to the Piranhas’ status as a crime drama film than to Shakespeare. Perhaps Romeo and Juliet has become so ingrained in popular culture, that we are now inclined to see it even where it isn’t — like when you see human faces in vegetables and plug sockets. Perhaps those promoting Piranhas understood not only the notoriety but also the selling power of Romeo and Juliet, and simply seized upon an opportunity to increase the audience for a story that features Italian teenagers in love. Perhaps they also saw a loose parallel in the film’s gang culture with one of the most popular and influential works of the Romeo and Juliet subgenre, Baz Luhrmann’s gun-toting 1997 film. But is that enough?
To offer some form of conclusion, I’ll turn to that stalwart of contemporary Western culture: The Simpsons. Towards the end of the Season 3 episode Bart’s Friend Falls in Love, Milhouse laments the end of his relationship with new girl Samantha, telling Bart: ‘We started out like Romeo and Juliet, but it ended up in tragedy’. The line perhaps stands better than any other moment in pop culture to demonstrate Romeo and Juliet’s contemporary cultural status. Milhouse’s mistake is primarily humorous, but it’s also earnest: for him — and also for many audience members — all a story needs to echo Romeo and Juliet is a pair of star-cross’d young lovers.
¹ Michael A. Anderegg, Cinematic Shakespeare, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, p. 57.
