430 - Cyrano de Bergerac, France, 1990. Dir. Jean-Paul Rappeneau.

Tuesday, March 6, 2018

430 - Cyrano de Bergerac, France, 1990.  Dir. Jean-Paul Rappeneau.

Cyrano de Bergerac was a real man.

You could go your whole life and not know that, and it would not matter.  He has become such a character of fiction that any resemblance to actual persons living or dead may as well be purely coincidental.

The real Cyrano de Bergerac was born in Paris in 1619 and lived to be 36, dying in 1655.  He was a writer of cyprian literature and a member of the military and a swordsman.  Apparently, he was a bold and boastful figure who did have a female cousin who did marry Christian of Neuvillette.

You may be interested to know that he wrote a couple of proto-science fiction works about traveling to the moon and to the sun.  Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657) and The States and Empires of the Sun (1662).

The Cyrano de Bergerac that most people know is a fictional character in the play of the same name, written by Edmond Rostand and premiered in 1897.  Rostand, from Marseille, France, wrote the play in Alexandrine couplets, and his final two words, "my panache," which are repeated in this film, brought the word panache over into English.

Brian Hooker wrote an English translation in blank verse, and Anthony Burgess (yes, the writer of A Clockwork Orange) wrote two different translations of Cyrano de Bergerac.

For our film, Jean-Paul Rappeneau himself and Jean-Claude Carriere wrote the screenplay.

Cyrano is played by the one-and-only Gerard Depardieu, who plays him with panache and many other fine qualities.  You might know him for co-starring with Robert de Niro in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 (1976), and we have already seen and loved him opposite Catherine Deneuve in Francois Truffaut's The Last Metro (1980).  He plays Reynaldo in Kenneth Branagh's grand version of Hamlet (1996).  He appeared with Andie MacDowell in Peter Weir's Green Card (1990), opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Randall Wallace's The Man in the Iron Mask (1998), as Jean-Pierre Le Pelt with Glenn Close in the live-action version of Disney's 101 Dalmations (2000), in the Edith Piaf biography starring Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose (2007), and in Ang Lee's Life of Pi (2012).

He started working in 1967 and works constantly.  He has at least eight movies slated to come out this year.

Cyrano de Bergerac is a great man with a great soul.  He is brave, noble, valiant, and daring.  He is strong and athletic and can win any duel or any battle.  He can take on one hundred men and beat them.  He is also a great writer.  He can write with his pen or he can write with his tongue.  He can make up rhyming couplets impromptu and he can engage in extended metaphors and conceits on the fly.  He also has a great heart, and he loves deeply.

He is the kind of man that any woman would love.

Except that he has this big nose.  And, more crucially, he is self-conscious about it.  He is so self-conscious that he believes the love of his life, his cousin Roxane, who has loved him dearly since childhood and with whom he shares a lifetime of precious memories, could never love him in return.

He thinks he is ugly.  And he is ashamed of it.

He has in his regiment a man named Christian de Neuvillette.  Christian is handsome.  Other than that, he is bumbling and dense and inarticulate and cowardly.

Yet Roxane is drawn to his appearance.

She asks her dear cousin Cyrano if he will protect Christian.  Look out for him.  Make sure that he is not killed in battle.  And Cyrano, being the noble man that he is, and loving Roxane, promises her.

Which means that when Christian profoundly and profusely mocks Cyrano about his nose before all the men of the regiment, Cyrano must hold back and not hurt him.

And he must tell Christian in secret that he will help him win Roxane's heart.

Cyrano begins to write love letters and speeches for Christian, who otherwise would not have the ability to put two words together to impress Roxane.

And it all culminates one dark night when the two men stand beneath her balcony and Cyrano selflessly feeds words to Christian for Christian to say.  Words that spring from the depths of Cyrano's heart.  Words of a poet.  Words of a soldier.  Words of a gentleman.  Words of a lover.

Words which Christian cannot spit out of his mouth even when Cyrano spoonfeeds them to him.

So in that dark of night Cyrano begins to woo Roxane himself, in his own voice, trying to mask it, whispering, insisting that he is Christian, so that Roxane falls in love now not only for Christian's appearance but also for his soul.

If only he had a soul.  If only Cyrano had a face.

Cyrano follows through on his noble promise and helps Roxane and Christian marry just as the two men are sent off to battle with their regiment.

And the brave and loving Cyrano writes to her every day in Christian's name and risks death every night to cross enemy lines to get the letters to her.  Her heart thrills for the man who is writing her.  Cyrano's heart breaks for the woman he loves.  The viewer's heart longs for Roxane somehow to discover the truth, and for Cyrano and Roxane finally to get together.

Jean-Paul Rappeneau films Cyreno de Bergerac as a breathtaking historical epic, a war film, a romantic drama, an adventure, with moments of bawdy comedy, and a great deal of virtuosic wordplay.

Cyrano may or may not win Roxane's heart.

But he will win yours.