Cyrano de Bergerac (1990)

Cyrano de Bergerac is a French romantic film drama first released in 1990, directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau.  The film is based on a play by Edmond Rostand and stars Gérard Depardieu, Anne Brochet, Vincent Perez, Jacques Weber and Roland Bertin.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


The popular swordsman and poet Cyrano de Bergerac is consumed by his ardent love for his cousin Roxanne but, tragically, his features are so deformed by his large nose that he has little chance of gaining her affections.  Roxanne is herself in love with another soldier, Christian de Neuvillette, but he lacks wit and conversation.  Realising his suit is lost, Cyrano offers to help Christian to win Roxanne by writing passionate love letters on his behalf.  Sure enough, the romantically minded Roxanne begins to love the soul behind the letters, believing this to be Christian, not Cyrano...

Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s lavish adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac was emblematic of the sudden and unexpected return to form of French cinema in 1990, after a decade in which for the most part it had become inward-looking and stale, content merely to rehash old tired genres and singularly failing to hold onto the international following which the New Wave had stimulated some decades earlier.  Cyrano de Bergerac, along with Yves Robert’s diptych La Gloire de mon père / Le Château de ma mère and Luc Besson’s Nikita, all released in 1990, spearheaded a dramatic revitalisation of French cinema in the early 1990s, beginning what may legitimately be termed a new age for the film auteur in France.  The energy, confidence and panache that is so evident in Cyrano de Bergerac surpasses anything seen in French cinema for over a decade, and any French film enthusiast who saw the film when it first came out must have felt that an ogre had suddenly awoken from a deep slumber, fully refreshed and ready to do business.  It was the beginning of a new era, the most exciting since those heady days of la nouvelle vague.

What makes this all the more surprising is that Cyrano de Bergerac is not a groundbreaking piece of cinema.  Rather, it is actually a very traditional kind of French film, a return to the swashbuckling spectaculars that had delighted audiences in the 1950s and 60s.  Its innovation is that it has everything needed to make it a mainstream success - a big name lead actor, lavish action sequences, stunning production values - as well as being an auteur film in the truest sense.  It has a quite distinctive character (which sets it apart from contemporary Hollywood offerings) and retains much of Rostand’s original dialogue, in the form of rhyming couplets, skilfully abridged by screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière.  This knack of appealing to both mainstream and art house audiences is something that French filmmakers rediscovered in the 1990s - presumably taking their lead from the massive success of Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette (1986) - and this (along with more generous government subsidies) is what allowed French cinema to prosper to the extent that it became a credible challenger to the Hollywood behemoth throughout the following decade.  

And Cyrano de Bergerac was an enormously successful film, both at home and internationally.  It attracted an audience of 4.7 million in France and proved to be almost as big a hit abroad, one of the most popular French films to be released in the UK and the US.  Having won widespread critical acclaim, it featured prominently in the award ceremonies of 1990/1991, winning an Oscar for its costume design, four BAFTAs (albeit in minor categories), the Golden Globe for the Best Foreign Film and a remarkable tally of ten Césars (in categories that included Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Cinematography).  No other French film has been as enthusiastically well-received by the critics and audiences since that sword-waving poet with the implausibly large nasal protuberance burst onto cinema screens in 1990.

Jean-Paul Rappeneau had directed another feisty historical romp before this - Les Mariés de l’an II (1971) - and would subsequently go on to make another big budget period piece, Le Hussard sur le toit (1995), but neither of these cinematic extravaganzas can compare with Cyrano de Bergerac, his one masterpiece.  Served by an outstanding cast and an equally talented technical crew, Rappeneau crafts what is most people’s idea of the perfect French adventure film, combining old-fashioned romanticism with a modern cinematic flair, a film that appeals to the widest possible audience and offers something for everyone.   Gérard Depardieu absolutely revels in his portrayal of Cyrano and gives a performance worthy of his stature (as the then leading actor in France) and his talents - he has the physical presence to dominate the action sequences and the dramatic range to inject barrel-loads of poignancy into the more intimate scenes.  Anne Brochet, Vincent Perez and Jacques Weber deserve as much credit for their sterling contributions which supply the nuanced character detail that all too often gets overlooked in blockbuster epics of this kind.  Twenty years on from its first release, Cyrano de Bergerac is as fresh and succulent as it was when it first hit the big screen, and it remains one of the classiest historical dramas cinema has so far given us.  Definitely not one you should turn your nose up at.

© James Travers 2011

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