Kaitlyn Dever is Romeo’s jilted ex GF in Rosaline, a sweet but slight new comedy. To Eliza Janssen, the contemporary feminist take on Shakespeare didn’t ring true.
Garden gnomes, seals, Americans: we’ve seen Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet take countless forms over the past 500 years or so. The main thing many of us see them as these days is melodramatic dummies. Surely their instantaneous and ultimately fatal love for one another was only fuelled, rather than suppressed, by their parent’s disapproval?
We all know that longing is way sexier than consummation, and a post-credits scene in the latest adaptation Rosaline seems to confirm this: a reference to The Graduate that suggests the hormonal pair wouldn’t really have much to talk about without all that familial drama going on in the background.
So with those dull, overexposed teeny-boppers out of the way, who do we hear from in this new take, adapted from Rebecca Serle’s YA novel? Not Paris, who was made adorable and sympathetic by Paul Rudd in Romeo + Juliet: here he’s queer-coded as the real hero’s gay best friend. It’s really refreshing to see Kaitlyn Dever take centre stage as the unfairly sidelined ex of Romeo Rosaline, mentioned but never seen in the original tragedy.
Dever can do this kind of sass in her sleep, but it’s a joy to see her break away from her filmography of victimised and traumatised young people in Dopesick, Unbelievable, Beautiful Boy and more.
Turns out she’s the one responsible for the whole Capulet/Montague mess: missing a date with her Heath Ledger-lookalike BF Romeo that allows him to meet her Olivia Rodrigo-lookalike cousin Juliet, and then failing to deliver the letters explaining their faux-suicidal plan. All because she’s not naive enough to tell Romeo she loves him after a few creaky sonnets!
She’s one of these historically inaccurate young women who just wants to “travel the world, be free, have adventures”—repulsed at the life being wed and bred that all renaissance women, unlike our girlboss heroine for some reason, were conditioned to accept.
You need a Disney+ subscription to see this familiar, slight comedy, and so you’ve certainly already heard the same songs from Belle, Ariel, Moana and the rest. I can’t be mad at 2022 jokes about lactose intolerance or the obligatory Ye Olde Timey covers of Robyn and Celine Dion, as they’re fun enough. But at this point, tales of rebellious, independent princesses are the standard, not its subversion. The anachronistic feminism of Rosaline doesn’t just ring false—it can barely be heard at this point, over the riot grrl din of past remixed Shakespeare heroines in 10 Things I Hate About You and She’s The Man.
Rosaline also has the poor luck of coming out in the same month as Lena Dunham’s Catherine Called Birdy, a strikingly similar film with the same scenes of our spunky protagonist spurning unappealing suitors. I liked Minnie Driver’s frustrated, overqualified nurse character plenty, but Rosaline’s obvious love interest Dario (Oscar Isaac-lookalike Sean Teale) is your garden variety YA eye candy.
Filmmakers will never stop finding new turns and perspectives on the Bard’s timeless plots, but at this point a bit more invention is necessary. The Shakespeare remixes need a remix themselves, and Rosaline ain’t it.
