Cyrano De Bergerac

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2008-09-09 rating:
This is the one to get!
The DVD from 2000 is very disappointing from a technical point of view, but this is a great improvement (it goes without saying that the film is wonderful). I had the earlier one and gladly replaced it with this and I'm here to spread the good news...

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review by: date: 2007-11-25 rating:
Superb Depardieu
Edmond Rostand's 19th play is brilliantly adapted here by director Jean-Paul Rappeneau, and perhaps when I watch the film again I may give it 5 stars like the other reviewers.

Depardieu dominates the film with a stunning performance. This is most evident in the first half of the film where he does everything with a style and feeling that is missing from so many films these days. The acting overall is of a very high standard and the script, even allowing for translation and subtitle misinterpretations is beautifully done.

The reason I have not awarded it five stars is for one main reason. After the brilliant first half of the film, the second half just seemed a little less focused to me and overall I felt the film was a little too long. The ending in particular dragged a bit. Its probably exactly as per the original play, but for me this didn't work on film and it felt a bit hammy.

However this is a minor criticism and overall I strongly recommend the film.

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review by: date: 2007-07-15 rating:
Cyrano and Depardieu, with panache
In a Parisian theater, where Cyrano has just run off a portly, mannered spouter of bad verse, a man makes the error of noticing Cyrano's nose. "Why are you looking at my nose? Does it disgust you," Cyrano asks with dangerous politeness. "No, not at." "Is it soft and dangling/" "I did not look at it!" the man protests. "And why did you not look at it?" Cyrano persists. "Sickened you, did it? Is the color all wrong? Is it obscene?" "Not at all," the man says, looking for a way out. "Why, then, do you criticize? Do you find it too large in size?" "It's terribly small, miniscule," the man stammers. "What was that?" Cyrano glares, "Is that an insult? My nose is small then, eh? My nose, sir, is enormous! Cretinous moron, a man ought to be proud of such an appendix. A great nose may be an index of a great soul...kind, endowed with liberality and courage...like mine, you rat-brained dunce, unlike yours, all rancid porridge. It would be grotesque to fist your wretched mug, so lacking as it is in pride, genius, the lyrical and picturesque, in spark, spunk...in brief: in nose!"

Cyrano (Gerard Depardieu) is a man with heart and spirit as large as his nose, a man who loves deeply, yet must love through another. When Roxane (Anne Brochet), his cousin whom he loves more than his life, gives her heart to Christian (Vincent Perez), he is so determined to bring her happiness that he provides the passionate words that this handsome young man, whose brain is as thick as mutton, will use to win her. Cyrano is convinced that his face will forever doom him to solitude, much less enable him to speak his heart directly to Roxane. "I can never be loved," he says to le Bret, one of his few friends, "even by the ugliest. My nose precedes me by fifteen minutes. Whom do I love? It should be clear. I love the prettiest far and near...the finest, the wittiest, the sweetest...the wisest...yes, Roxane." There will be years before Roxane realizes she had loved the man whose words she loved, not the man whose handsome face she saw.

Cyrano is a swordsman, a poet, a soldier, a playwright. He uses words with as much skill as he uses his blade. He'll fight a duel while reciting a poem he creates as he fights...and at the end...hit. If someone is rash enough to comment on his nose, he'll make a fool of the fop by describing all the comparisons a truly imaginative man would have used. He will never bend the knee, accept a sponsor, praise a mediocrity or knuckle to authority. None of that is for him; what he wants is to "sing, dream, laugh...move on...be alone...have a choice...have a watchful eye and a powerful voice...wear my hat awry...fight for a poem if I like...and perhaps even die."

This version of Cyrano features terrific production values, with great attention to settings, costume and style. The story moves along with duels and battles, love and lost love. Most of all, it moves along on the language and on the situation of Cyrano, himself. It's a French movie, but the subtitles were written by Anthony Burgess. The are soft and caressing, pungent, funny and sad. At times they move so effortlessly into couplets that it's only after you've read them that you realize how much they added to a scene. Depardieu is one of the great contemporary actors, and he creates a riveting Cyrano. Depardieu is a big man with thick shoulders and a deep chest. No one would likely call him handsome. He is a phenomenal actor, however. His Cyrano is imposing as he strides along a cobblestone street in his red cloak and black, plumed, wide-brimmed hat. Depardieu creates a Cyrano easy to imagine you might be a little like, or could be...if you had Cyrano's panache.

Tragedy, Cyrano isn't, but it's a wonderfully robust, sad, romantic melodrama.

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review by: date: 2006-12-08 rating:
Cyrano de Bergerac
Be warned! The subtitles on this release are awful! Only half of the dialogue has been transcribed into subtitles! If you love this film & don't speak fluent French you will be climbing the walls with frustration as you notice that line after line is not subtitled, compared to the full and complete subtitling available on the Taratn Video DVD edition. Buy that one instead! The 5 stars are for the film itself, which is a solid-gold masterpiece.


review by: date: 2006-07-23 rating:
One of the high water marks of French cinema
Jean-Paul Rappeneau's wonderfully cinematic version of Cyrano De Bergerac is one of the genuine high water marks of modern French cinema. Rappeneau is a director who really understands movement, and his far from static approach revitalizes the piece and frees it from the tyranny of the wonderful words to give it wings, while Gerard Depardieu's magnificent Cyrano keeps the film's emotions beautifully grounded. For once the supporting characters aren't played as idiots: Christian is no fool, merely an inarticulate man increasingly aware that his is a false victory, and the Comte De Guiche is allowed more dignity than you'd expect from a part that's usually reduced to mere comedy villainy.

Almost everything about the film is perfect, from Rappeneau and Jean-Claude Carriere's superb screenplay to Jean-Claude Petit's restrained score, which subtly underlines the emotions rather than play up the pathos (a shame his action cues use a thinly-disguised version of Danny Elfman's Batman theme: someone obviously fell in love with the temp track). Wonderful stuff, even if Cyrano takes longer to shuffle off this mortal coil than Brando did in Mutiny on the Bounty.

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