The original play was
written
in 1897 by the Frenchman Edmund Rostand. There was a real 17th century man of name, but the play is a broad
fictionalization of his life.
Rostard wrote his play
in verse, and it has been
translated and performed many times,
introducing the word ‘panache’ into the English
language. The English writer (and
polymath) Anthony Burgess wrote a new verse translation of Cyrano de
Bergerac
in 1970, performed in Minneapolis
in 1973 and ten years later in a
Royal Shakespeare production.
Burgess also wrote a musical adaptation starring Christopher Plummer
on Broadway.
For the 1990 film,
starring Gerald Depardieu,
Burgess’s translation, written in rhyming couplets, was used as the English
sub-titles. Depardieu won an
Oscar for his performance (plus many other awards.)
There
had been a highly acclaimed
English language film starring Jose Ferrer in 1950, and in 1959 a Japanese
samurai version, The Life of an Expert Swordsman, was made starring
Toshiro Mifune. In
1987 film Steve Martin made a successful contemporary comedy version, starring
Daryl Hannah as Roxanne.
Some
modern literary critics have wondered if, as Rostand was gay, he used his own
experience of being socially unacceptable in this play, Cyrano’s nose being a
metaphor.
In 1991 the great film
critic Roger Ebert wrote; It is entirely appropriate that Cyrano - whose
very name evokes the notion of grand romantic gestures - should have lived his
life bereft of romance. What is romanticism, after all, but a bold cry about
how life should be, not about how it is? And so here is Cyrano de Bergerac,
hulking, pudding-faced, with a nose so large he is convinced everyone is
laughing at him - yet he dares to love the fair Roxane.
The "real"
Cyrano, if there was such a creature beneath the many layers of myth that have
grown up around the name, lived in France from 1619 to 1655, and wrote stories
about his magnificent voyages to the moon and the sun. He inspired the Cyrano
we love, a more modern creation and now here is a magnificently lusty,
brawling, passionate and tempestuous classical version, directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau.
You would not think
he would be right for the role. Shouldn't Cyrano be smaller, more tentative,
more pathetic - instead of this outsized, physically confident man of
action?
Depardieu is often
said to be "wrong" for his roles. His physical presence makes a
definite statement on the screen, and then his acting genius goes to work, and
transforms him into whatever is required for the role - into a spiritual
priest, a hunchbacked peasant, a medieval warrior, a car salesman, a
businessman, a sculptor, a gangster.
Here he plays Cyrano,
gadfly and rabble-rouser, man about town, friend of some, envied by many,
despised by a powerful few, and hopelessly, oh, most painfully and endearingly,
in love with Roxane.
But his nose is too
large. When he looks in the
mirror he knows it would be an affront to present the nose anywhere in the
vicinity of the fair Roxane with an amorous purpose attached to it.
Now here is the
inoffensive clod Christian.
For him, love is a fancy. For Cyrano, a passion. Yet if Cyrano cannot
have Roxane, then he will help his friend, and so he ghostwrites letters and
ghost-recites speeches in the moonlight, and because Roxane senses that the
words come from a heart brave and true, she pledges herself to Christian. The
irony - which only the audience can fully appreciate - is that anyone with a
heart so pure that she could love a cheesy lump like Christian because of his
language could certainly love a magnificent man like Cyrano for the same
reason, and regardless of his nose.
If you don't know the brilliance of the late Roger Ebert, his website is still being run and the archive is lodged there, full of gems. Ebert was a dedicated, informed, deeply literate critic, and usually generous. His ire, however, was best avoided.
Michael Bay's movie 'Pearl Harbor' was described by Mr Ebert as 'a two hour film squeezed into three hours, about how, on December 7th 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.' If you want to read even crueler, though not necessarily sharper, 'hatchet jobs' go to Mark Kermode's book of that name.
