Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah starred in the wonderful modern-dress comedy Roxanne (1987), inspired by the outlines of Rostand’s story, and now here is a magnificently lusty, brawling, passionate, and tempestuous classical version, directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau. Cyrano is played by Gérard Depardieu, the most popular actor in France, who won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival last May.
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 (Anne Brochet). But his nose is too large. Not quite as long as Steve Martin’s was, perhaps, but long enough that 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 de Neuvillette (Vincent Perez), Cyrano’s friend. He is a romantic, too, but not in Cyrano’s league. 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.
The screenplay by Rappeneau and the skilled veteran Jean-Claude Carrière spins this love story in a web of court intrigue and scandal, with Cyrano deeply involved on the wrong (that is, the good) side. And it all leads up to the heartbreaking final round of revelations and truth telling, and at last to Depardieu’s virtuoso dying scene, which has to be seen to be believed.
What other actor would have had the courage to go with such determination so far over the top, to milk the pathos so shamelessly, to stagger and groan and weep and moan until it would all be funny? Only the French could conceive and write, and perhaps only Depardieu could deliver, a dying speech that rises and falls with pathos and defiance for so long, only to end with the assertion that when he is gone, he will be remembered for . . . what? His heart? Courage? No, of course not. Nothing half so commonplace: for his panache.
Cyrano de Bergerac is a splendid movie not just because it tells its romantic story, makes it visually delightful, and centers it on Depardieu, but for a better reason: The movie acts as if it believes this story. Depardieu is not a satirist—not here, anyway. He plays Cyrano on the level, for keeps.
Of course, the material is comic. But it is the frequent mistake of amateurs to play comedy for laughs, when the great artists know there is only one way to play it, and that is very seriously indeed.
But with panache.
Day for Night
PG, 116 m., 1974
Francois Truffaut (Ferrand), Jean-Pierre Aumont (Alexandre), Jacqueline Bisset (Julie), Jean-Pierre Leaud (Alphonse), Valentina Cortese (Séverine). Directed by Truffaut and produced by Marcel Bébert. Screenplay by Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard, and Suzanne Shiffman.
Movies about movies usually don’t quite get things right. The film business comes out looking more romantic and glamorous (or more corrupt and decadent) than it really is, and none of the human feeling of a movie set is communicated. That is not the case with Francois Truffaut’s funny and touching film, Day for Night, which is not only the best movie ever made about the movies but is also a great entertainment.
A movie company, especially if it’s away from home on a location somewhere, is a family that’s been thrown into close and sometimes desperate contact; strangers become friends and even intimates in a few weeks, and in a few more weeks they’re scattered to the winds. The family is complicated by the insecurities and egos of the actors, and by the moviemaking process itself: We see the result, but we don’t see the hours and days spent on special effects, on stunts, on making it snow or making it rain or making an allegedly trained cat walk from A to B. Day for Night is about all of these aspects of moviemaking; about the technical problems, the boredom between takes (a movie set is one of the most boring places on earth most of the time), and about the romances and intrigues. It’s real; this is how a movie set really looks, feels, and smells. Truffaut’s story involves a movie company on location in Nice. They’re making a melodrama called Meet Pamela, of which we see enough to know it’s doomed at the box office. But good or bad, the movie must be made; Truffaut, who plays the director in his own film, says at one point: “When I begin a film, I want to make a great film. Halfway through, I just hope to finish the film.”
His cast includes a beautiful American actress (Jacqueline Bisset); an aging matinee idol (Jean-Pierre Aumont), and his former mistress, also past her prime (Valentina Cortese); the young, lovestruck male lead (Jean-Pierre Leaud), and the entire crew of script girls, camera operators, stunt men, and a henpecked production manager. (And if you have ever wondered what the key grip does in a movie, here’s your chance to find out.) Truffaut sets half a dozen stories in motion, and follows them all so effortlessly it’s almost as if we’re gossiping with him about his colleagues. The movie set is a microcosm: there is a pregnancy and a death; a love affair ended, another begun, and a third almost but not quite destroyed; and new careers to be nourished and old careers to be preserved.
Truffaut was always a master of quiet comedy, and there are fine touches like the aging actress fortifying herself with booze and blaming her lack of memory on her makeup girl. Then there’s the young male lead’s ill-fated love for Jacqueline Bisset; she is happily married to a doctor, but unwisely extends her sympathy to the youth, who repays her by very nearly destroying her marriage as well as himself. And all the time there is the movie to be made: Truffaut gives us a hilarious session with the “trained” cat, and shows us without making a point of it how snow is produced on a set, how stunt drivers survive car crashes, and how third-floor balconies can exist without buildings below them.
What we see on the screen is nothing at all like what happens on the set—a truth the movie’s title reflects. (“Day for night” is the technical term for “night” scenes shot in daylight with a special filter. The movie’s original French title, La Nuit Americaine, is the French term for the same process—acknowledging their debt to Hollywood.)
The movie is just plain fun. Movie buffs will enjoy it like Singin’ in the Rain (that perfect musical about the birth of talkies), but you don’t have to be a movie buff to like it. Truffaut knows and loves the movies so much it’s infectious; one of Day for Night’s best scenes is a dream in which the adult director remembers himself, as a little boy, slinking down a darkened street to steal a still from Citizen Kane from in front of a theater. We know who the little boy grew up to be, and that explains everything to us about how he feels now.