They are surrounded by other manly jocks who sometimes interact with the couple’s citational drama, but mostly stay in the background playing cards and paying little attention to the ghostly theater that surrounds them. Romeo and Juliet are interchangeable doubles reveling in the erotic, but mostly narcissistic, possibilities of the military academy, where the fantasy of air-tight homogeneity is nothing short of literal. When the lovers finally kiss, or when they cuddle under the sheets, it’s hard to tell Capulets from Montagues. Perhaps that’s precisely the point, but for a story about passionate love in its most delusional proportion, Private Romeo is decidedly sterile.
