• Cyrano, My Love (Edmond)

12/12/20 (Sat), Tokyo

A fanciful story of how Edmond Rostand came up with the idea of his blockbuster hit Cyrano de Bergerac back in 1897. With only three weeks to write the script, he draws inspiration from his own life to craft the show: he helps his handsome but inarticulate friend write love letters to a beautiful woman – ding! A black restaurant proprietor lashes out at a patron for being too timid and unoriginal in his “black” insults, offering him some more intelligent offerings before throwing him out – ding! The process is slow but steady, going from one disaster to another –   e.g. the gangster’s insistence on using a hard-to-handle actress, the star’s bumbling son in a key role, the threatened closure of the show, the female lead’s sudden incapacity on opening night – until the historic triumph with 40 curtain calls lasting an hour (that part appears to be true).

This is a blatant rip-off conceptually of Shakespeare in Love, but when it’s done this well, who’s complaining? Fair enough that France should borrow the idea for one of its greatest playwrights. It’s all about the execution, and they’ve come up with enough crazy developments, albeit some more credible than others, to justify it. This “Rostand in Love” was done first as a popular stage show, which I would love to see (it’s been done in English in the UK), but its theatrical roots are barely evident here in the gorgeous settings and filming.

The unrelenting twists and turns are all more or less logical, and the pacing is immaculate. A knowledge of the play clearly helps appreciate the many cross-references, but my friend thoroughly enjoyed it without knowing anything about it. Various scenes were reminiscent of older shows, like Noises Off and Cuckoo’s Nest (when a nervous young actor comes bounding confidently out on the stage after a co-star has, let’s say, released his tension in the dressing room). But whether these were conscious borrowings or not isn’t clear, and the film had an original take on them. The tone was light throughout. I don’t know what if any of this was real – I assume we can count out the funny disappearance and return of the diva, but I wonder if they really rounded up dance hall girls and bar patrons to fill the house. And what was Chekhov doing there? In any case, it was best just to go along for the ride.

There is terrific acting all around, topped by Olivier Gourmet as Constant Coquelin, the original Cyrano, who ran away with all his scenes. I rolled my eyes when the black restaurateur came on, thinking this was another case of diversity gone wild, but it made complete sense in the context of the story and was very well done. The French are so much better at this. (Blacks have a different history in France anyway, though I still wonder if Sarah Bernhardt would really be kissing the guy in public.)

A fun film. I’m seeing a silent version of Cyrano in a few weeks, so this is a nice prelude.