Jean-Paul Rappeneau (1990)

Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac was first staged in 1897.  Set in mid-seventeenth century France and spanning the last fifteen years of the life of its eponymous hero (the real Cyrano de Bergerac was born in 1619 and died in 1655), the play has been translated to film plenty of times – sometimes as straightforward adaptation, sometimes using Rostand’s set-up as the basis for a recasting of the story in a different time and place.  The best-known picture in the latter category is probably Fred Schepisi’s Roxanne, in which the equivalent of Renaissance man Cyrano is a fire chief (played by Steve Martin) in a small town in contemporary Washington.  Roxanne appeared in 1987, three years before Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Cyrano de Bergerac.  A major critical and commercial success internationally, Rappeneau’s film is widely considered the definitive screen realisation of the Rostand script.

The 1950 Hollywood Cyrano de Bergerac (the first English-language film of the play), starring Jose Ferrer, was produced by Stanley Kramer and directed by Michael Gordon, at least as well known for his work in theatre as in cinema (though he made Pillow Talk later in his career).  Gordon’s Cyrano was condemned by some critics as stagy and, even though it didn’t cost much, lost money at the time.  According to Wikipedia, Rappeneau’s version wasn’t made on a shoestring ($15m, equivalent to around twice that sum today); its box-office receipts were nearly three times its budget.  This Cyrano is a strikingly confident piece of work.  The confidence reflects Rappeneau’s ‘instinct that Rostand’s flexible couplets, leaping from one character to another in mid-line and maintaining their alexandrine rhythm by an unpredictable, boldly naturalistic scattering of words and exclamations, would work as well on film as on stage’[1].  I recall being very taken with the film on its original release.  A newly-restored print was showing this month at BFI and a second viewing seemed overdue.  It was a surprise and a disappointment to find it hard work.

There’s no shortage of physical action.  In the early stages, at least, Rappeneau’s Cyrano is almost excessively boisterous – in the manner of films of classic plays at pains to establish their motion picture credentials (Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew is a more egregious example).    Jean-Claude Petit’s music is splendidly varied and Pierre Lhomme’s crystalline lighting very fine.   Much of the playing is decidedly theatrical – notably from Jacques Weber (as the arrogant Comte de Guiche) and Roland Bertin (the cook shop proprietor Ragueneau) – but there’s plenty in it to enjoy.  Rappeneau handles the crowd scenes with aplomb, though their often choreographed quality is sometimes odd, especially in the Siege of Arras conflict between the Gascon cadets and the invading Spanish army.  A more persistent problem, though, is the words.

Cyrano de Bergerac is very much about words.  The poetically gifted hero uses them to express his passion for his beautiful cousin Roxane – a passion he thinks must be unrequited because his huge nose makes him ridiculous and unlovable by any woman.  The young cadet Christian de Neuvillette, also in love with Roxane, is, in contrast, just a pretty face – at any rate, he can’t write the love letters that Roxane expects.  Cyrano composes them on Christian’s behalf but also to speak his own mind.  In the play’s famous balcony scene, Cyrano stands literally in the shadows, feeding Christian lines to call out to Roxane in her chamber above.  Rappeneau involved some high-powered writers to transmit Rostand’s words to the screen.  Jean-Claude Carrière shares the screenplay credit with Rappeneau.  The English subtitles are supplied by Anthony Burgess’s rendering of Rostand:  Burgess’s rhyming couplets are both more ingenious and, largely as a consequence, more distracting than your average subtitles.  Watching the action, listening to the French cast’s delivery of lines, and reading the English translation all at the same time, is a challenge.

Even without this complication, there’s another, inherent difficulty in turning Rostand’s verse play into cinema.  It’s easier in a theatre than it is on the screen for the verbal to dominate the physical.  When the inamorati are as nice-looking a pair as Anne Brochet’s Roxane and Vincent Perez’s Christian, it’s harder to believe that words are the lifeblood of their romance.  Both these young actors are good (though Brochet has a faintly self-satisfied air) but the acting honours go, as expected and as they must, to the star of the show.

Jose Ferrer won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in the title role of the 1950 Cyrano de Bergerac.  In 1991, I thought that Gérard Depardieu, who was nominated, should have done the same.   (The award that year went to Jeremy Irons in Reversal of Fortune.)  I still do:  although I didn’t much like Rappeneau’s film on this return visit, I was no less impressed by the lead.   Depardieu, although still sylphlike compared with the man-mountain of more recent years, is physically very well cast:  he captures the hero’s vigorous, robust side effortlessly.   His unconventional good looks turn Cyrano’s disfiguring outsize snout into something more poignant than it would be on a thoroughly plain face.  He often speaks beautifully and passionately but he never pushes for sympathy.   He’s formidable and formidable.

30 January 2020

[1] Philip Strick, Monthly  Film Bulletin, January 1991