Film adaptation of “Cyrano” by Joe Wright: Poets of Hearts – Culture

The transitions here are very soft and flowing. From speaking to singing, from life to art, from daily work flows to exciting choreography. With the utmost naturalness and at the same time dance-like elegance, the camera records the workings of the bakery, kneading and shaping the dough, baking and sorting the loaves of bread, while the conversation at the table naturally sings along. This is how Joe Wright works “Cyrano,” a musical adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s classic about the big-nosed poet of hearts, Cyrano de Bergerac. The actors sang it live, it’s not 100% perfect, but it’s more honest.

In Wright’s films there is always a tension between art and life, fairy tale and reality, exaggeration and everyday life. Together with his regular team, from photographer Shamus McGarvey to costume designer Jacqueline Doran, he once again creates magnificent images of colour, shapes and motion, in which the heroes Cyrano de Bergerac, Roxanne and Christian always look more like fairy tales and modern than in the poetic drama of 1897.

The play was filmed several times, including with Jose Ferrer and Gerard Depardieu in the title role, and a few years ago there was a German film “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” as the story of a bully on a school trip. Now Joe Wright dares to reinterpret the material that particularly affected him as a shy and anxious teenager with reading and writing difficulties. The basis of his new interpretation of Cyrano de Bergerac is the musical quote by Erica Schmidt, who, as the wife of the short “Game of Thrones” star Peter Dinklage, brought up her husband by the name of Cyrano.

It’s about the general feeling of being unloved at times

The trio of screenwriter, lead actor, and director together bring new depth, cosmopolitanism, and freshness to the airy distraction of two men groping the same woman in a symbiotic blend of grandiose body and poetic spirit. They cut out the silly nose to which an attractive actor has been glued as a prosthetic for theatrical makeup, but they don’t simply replace it with short stature, as Peter Dinklage emphasizes: it’s more inclusive about everyone, for whatever reason. Always, I once felt unloved. You can feel it in every moment in the intensity of his game.

As its setting, the Sicilian baroque town of Noto is a dream of a world heritage, where the reality of limestone buildings becomes the stage and the reality of the scene flows smoothly into the artificiality of the musical. Joe Wright celebrates the art of writing, the swing of the tip of the pen, the traces of ink that combine to form words and sentences, and the paper that flutters through space in a weightless way or moved by a delicate hand. Above all, “Cyrano” is an homage to the arts and creativity, to love poetry, to disguise and illusion, beginning with the grand opening scene in the theater with which Joe Wright is particularly associated through his upbringing in his theater parents’ dollhouse. A small tribute to this world of wonder, which continues to inspire him to this day, two wooden dolls made by his father can be seen very briefly.

Cyrano, UK, Canada, USA, 2021 Director: Joe Wright. Writers: Edmund Rostand, Erica Schmidt. Camera: Shamus McGarvey. Casting: Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Ben Mendelsohn. Distribution: Universal Pictures, Germany, 124 min. Movie release date: March 3, 2022