Cyrano de Bergerac is a 1990 French comedy drama film directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau and based on the 1897 play of the same name by Edmond Rostand, adapted by Jean-Claude Carrière and Rappeneau. It stars Gérard Depardieu, Anne Brochet and Vincent Pérez. The film was a co-production between companies in France and Hungary.
The film is the first theatrical film version of Rostand's original play in color, and the second theatrical film version of the play in the original French. It is also considerably more lavish and more faithful to the original than of the play. The film had 4, 732, 136 admissions in France.
The English subtitles use Anthony Burgess's translation of the text, which uses five-beat lines with a varying number of syllables and a regular couplet rhyming scheme, in other words, a sprung rhythm. Although he sustains the five-beat rhythm through most of the play, Burgess sometimes allows this structure to break deliberately: in Act V, he allows it collapse completely, creating a free verse.
In 2010, it was ranked #43 in magazine's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema".
Cyrano de Bergerac (Gérard Depardieu) is a Parisian poet and swashbuckler with a large nose of which he is self-conscious, but pretends to be proud. He is madly in love with his "friendly cousin" (they were not actually related as cousins), the beautiful Roxane (Anne Brochet); however, he does not believe she will requite his love because he considers himself physically unattractive, because of his over large nose. Soon, he finds that Roxane has become infatuated with Christian de Neuvillette (Vincent Pérez), a dashing new recruit to the Cadets de Gascogne, the military unit in which Cyrano is serving. Christian however, despite his good looks, is tongue-tied when speaking with women. Seeing an opportunity to vicariously declare his love for Roxane, he decides to aid Christian, who does not know how to court a woman and gain her love.
