Card 6.
The meeting of Romeo and Juliet, however, is staged as a (partial) emergence from drag, drugs and dress-up, Romeo unmasks, soaks his head in a deep washstand (we seem him through the water, from the bottom) and walks more securely. The moment of first meeting is also seen through water.
And if we are encouraged to experience this moment as "purer" in feeling than the the ball, it remains tinged by the hyperreal and hallucinatory.
Their initial intimacy is made possible by optical mediation. When Romeo takes Juliet's refracted image for immediate presence, he bumps his nose on the glass. The spectral images we see in the glass have momentary priority, as a complex play of refraction and reflection allow us to see the relationship beginning while the couple themselves are still, as Prospero might have put it, "surprised withal."
The first kiss takes place in the very temporary seclusion of an elevator between floors, and the balcony scene takes place in a swimming pool watched by a friendly security guard on an array of surveillance monitors. These scenes, too, develop the theme of the permeability of the Capulet space, its openness to the lovers' meetings and desires-- and in this contrast sharply with Zeffirelli's more anxious construction of privacy and seclusion under surveillance. To this point, the film intimates a kind of coexistence of Debordian "spectacle" and alternative spaces, styles and lifeways.