1990 film by Jean-Paul Rappeneau
Cyrano de Bergerac is a 1990 French period 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 Perez. The film was a co-production between companies in France and Hungary.
The film is the first feature film version of Rostand's original play in colour, 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 previous film versions of the play. The film had 4,732,136 admissions in France.
The film and the performance of Gérard Depardieu won numerous awards, notably 10 of the César Awards of 1991, two awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the People's Choice Award at the 15th Toronto International Film Festival.
Subtitles are used for the non-French market; the English-language version uses 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 to collapse completely, creating free verse.
In 2010, Cyrano de Bergerac was ranked number 43 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema".
Plot summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.