Word: rostand
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...national identity? An identity crisis -- in France? It sounds as unlikely as the notion of Cyrano de Bergerac fumbling his sword or groping for the mot juste. In his 1983 book The Europeans, the Italian journalist Luigi Barzini, a seasoned and mordant observer of the Continental scene, cites Edmond Rostand's fictional Cyrano as the quintessence of French character, at least as outsiders exaggerate it: the boastful, cocksure Gascon whose fellow provincials are defined in Rostand's play as "free fighters, free lovers, free spenders, defenders of old homes, old names and old splendors . . . bragging of crests , and pedigrees...
...decades he has been little more than a rumor of antique flourishes, known to the mass American audience mainly as the source of Steve Martin's genial little comedy Roxanne. Swordsman and poet, idealist and unrequited lover, born rebel as well as natural nobleman, the hero of Edmond Rostand's great romantic play is not, face it, a figure calculated to inspire a nonromantic age. One does not suppose, for example, that he figures very largely in George Bush's inner life. Or, for that matter, Jesse Jackson...
...have all been the poorer for this. And we are infinitely the richer for his sudden and glorious reincarnation by Gerard Depardieu in Jean-Paul Rappeneau's faithful and generous adaptation of Rostand's work. For the film not only restores this splendid spirit to his rightful place in our consciousness but also redeems a virtually abandoned cinematic tradition...
...their formative years, the movies took over the manner of Rostand's 19th ; century kind of theater, which was melodramatic in construction and spectacular in style, and actually improved on its substance, since film could realistically show splendors that the stage could only suggest. This Cyrano, abustle with action, aflame with rhetoric and spiced with humorous contempt for pompous and hypocritical swells, reminds us of a lost movie genre that, paradoxically, the original Cyrano helped inspire...