“She’ll not be hit

With Cupid’s arrow. She hath Dian’s wit.

And, in strong proof of chastity well armed

From love’s weak childish bow, she lives uncharmed.

She will not stay the siege of loving terms,

Nor bide th’ encounter of assailing eyes,

Nor ope her lap to saint-seducing gold.

Oh, she is rich in beauty, only poor

That when she dies, with beauty dies her store.” 

—Romeo, describing Rosaline; Act 1, Scene 1. 

Receiving only a total of ten mentions within the entirety of “Romeo and Juliet,” Rosaline Capulet has largely remained an insignificant role in the play’s 400-year history, not even worth appearing on stage played by an actual actor. However, in Karen Maine’s 2022 Hulu Original film, “Rosaline,” the age-old love story gets a fresh take told from the lesser-known Capulet cousin’s perspective. 

Inspired by the 2012 YA novel, “When You Were Mine” by Rebbecca Serle, the film attempts to reimagine the character Rosaline as a strong, independent woman who refuses to remain reduced to merely “Romeo’s former lover” and tell an untold part of the story. But ultimately, the final product proves to be an unsatisfactory romcom and arguably makes Rosaline out to be more of a selfish brat compared to the original. 

Admittedly, I’m no expert in Shakesphere. What high schooler really is? All I can recall of “Romeo and Juliet” from reading it in English and scrolling through SparkNotes, trying to understand even one verse of what these love-obsessed teens were going on about. Even I can’t deny that the tale is outdated; a love story to roll your eyes at. Except that technically, “Romeo and Juliet” isn’t a romance in the first place— it’s a tragedy, a cautionary tale. People can mock and say that it’s a terrible love story since it was never meant to be seen as one in the first place. One of the main moral lessons of the entire play was about not allowing your emotions to drive you, which is why every character who did such, including the main leads themselves, met with an unfortunate fate. 

“Rosaline” both keep to this theme and abandons it altogether. Changing the genre from tragedy to romcom, our protagonist is depicted as Romeo’s former girlfriend, who is soon dumped for her younger, prettier cousin and is determined to break the couple up in order to be with the man she believes she loves. While the premise of creating a personal narrative for Rosaline was indeed intriguing at the beginning, nonetheless, making her out to be the “jealous ex-girlfriend” completely waters down the intended meaningful message the film was trying to show.

Rosaline is transformed to be the snarky “feminist,” not caring what other men think of her and being outright rude to any who approaches her other than Romeo. The only other male character, excluding the love interest, Dario (although he still received some unwarranted hostility), she seems to treat with any sort of civility is Paris, who acts as her “gay best friend” in this particular adaptation, currently hiding in the closet but whose newly included sexuality is still played for cheap laughs. What makes matters worse is that despite insisting that she believes that all women should be treated with equal respect, the only other two female characters with any significance that Rosaline interacts with, Janet, the nurse and Juliet, she completely disregards them. 

Janet is supposed to act as one of Rosaline’s closest companions, and yet she only seems to exist to be confided in. Rosaline doesn’t even seem to care about Janet all that much, consistently not taking her seriously about her nursing profession, and doesn’t even refer to her name until the end of the film. On the other hand, when it comes to Juliet, Rosaline does everything short of directly bullying her for simply being in love with her ex, a fact Juliet was not even aware of and purposefully tries to break her heart. She goes from lying about what kind of person Romeo is, to demeaning Juliet, saying she doesn’t really understand what love feels like, to talking behind her back in her letters to Romeo, claiming she is intolerable and a nuisance to have around. Rosaline even goes as far as to conspire with Paris to arrange a marriage with Juliet in order to prevent her from running away with Romeo and providing Paris with a beard to continue hiding his sexuality. And this all appears to be justified as Juliet actually does turn out to be an immature and condescending brat halfway through the film, which goes against the sisterly bond that the first half of the film expresses. 

While it is unreasonable to expect a modern adaptation to remain completely loyal to the original source, there would be no point in adapting; otherwise, the film lost out on so much potential from not taking the time to understand what kind of character Rosaline was from the very beginning. Although she may not have had any speaking parts in the entire play, she is the girl who ultimately sets off the series of events that unfold into one of the most famous romantic tragedies of all time. She is the only other woman in the story with any agency that allows her to refuse Romeo’s romantic advances as she is set on following a path of celibacy, not wishing to get married at all. So imagine how frustrating it is to watch this movie, where instead, she is the desperate girl trying everything to win Romeo back, despite indications he only saw her as a child-bearing wife and left her without hesitation the moment another girl walked into the room. These are more like the actions of a hormonal teenager rather than the self-confident spirit Rosaline truly was. 

It is only when Rosaline herself falls for another man that she comes to her senses that it was unreasonable for her to try and sabotage somebody else’s love story. So with this change of heart, she sets out to assist the star-crossed lovers in faking their deaths in order to run off into the sunset, delivering the message that you shouldn’t stand in the way of true love. But that theme is thrown straight out of the window when the after-credit scene shows that upon sailing away in a boat, Romeo and Juliet find it terribly awkward upon realizing they have little in common, only knowing each other for a couple of weeks, and can’t even hold a single conversation together. Realistically, of course, it’s ridiculous to think about running away with someone you hardly know, but for the film to point this out, even though they already established Rosaline was in the wrong for trying to hinder their relationship, completely undermines the entire point the writers were trying to make. 

At the expense of trying to feel more relatable to today’s audience and receive a couple of laughs, they included aspects of the story that becomes inconsistent and rather redundant as the film goes on. The entire cast comes from Italy, but the majority speak in American accents and use modern slang; pop music plays from the speakers at the masquerade ball, but people still must hire a violin player in order to wallow with sad melodies; the Capulets and Montagues still have a hatred-filled rivalry which results in several deaths, but it still takes a scolding from Rosaline for them to bury the hatchet, even when both families were under the impression that they had just lost their children. My least favorite detail, in particular, was when the movie took time to explain that Rosaline had a random phobia of fish, a point of insecurity for her, somehow foreshadowing that it’d be vital information, only for it to have no other significance other than her crossing through a stream barefoot during the climax of the film. Nothing but a Chekhov’s gun loaded with air bullets. Anachronisms in a period drama are nothing uncommon, especially for comedy’s sake, but the problem was I didn’t find myself laughing. The comedic timing always seemed a bit off, and the execution was going more for dramatic effect rather than subtle slip-in, as if forcing itself to be funny. 

Overall, this film was never meant to be anything more than background noise to have on while you focused on something else. It probably would’ve done better set in a modern-day high school, where everyone is trying to act quirky and woke, but truthfully are nothing but inconsiderate egoists, than take itself so seriously as it did. There’s nothing I love more than a good rewrite of history to show how far we’ve progressed, but unfortunately, this is not one of those cases. If anything, this was a regression of Rosaline’s character, who started as a woman who knew she could live a content and fulfilling life without the presence of a man at all and ended up as the obnoxious aspiring cartographer with a fear of fish and no fear of making a fool of herself by trying to act like a girl boss.

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