The transitions here are very soft and flowing. From speaking to singing, from life to art, from everyday workflows to rousing dance choreography. With the utmost naturalness and at the same time dance-like elegance, the camera records the work processes in the bakery, the kneading and shaping of the dough, the baking and sorting of the loaves of bread, while the conversation at the counter naturally turns into singing. This is how Joe Wright’s “Cyrano” works, a musical adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s theater classic about the big-nosed poet of hearts, Cyrano de Bergerac. The actors sang live on set, not 100% perfect, but all the more truthful.
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 cameraman Shamus McGarvey to costume designer Jacqueline Durran, he once again creates an intoxicating imagery of colours, shapes and movements, in which the heroes Cyrano de Bergerac, Roxanne and Christian always seem more fairytale-like and modern than in the verse drama 1897.
The play has been filmed many times, including with José Ferrer and Gérard Depardieu in the title role, and a few years ago there was a German film entitled “The most beautiful girl in the world” as a bullying story on a school trip. Now Joe Wright is daring to reinterpret the material that had particularly touched him as a shy, anxious teenager with reading and writing disabilities. The basis of his new interpretation of Cyrano de Bergerac is the musical adaptation by Erica Schmidt, who, as the wife of the short “Game of Thrones” star Peter Dinklage, brought her husband along as Cyrano.
It’s about the universal feeling of being unlovable at times
Together, the trio of screenwriter, leading actor and director gives new depth, universality and freshness to the airy game of confusion about two men who court the same woman in the symbiotic combination of stately body and poetic spirit. They clip the silly nose that an attractive actor is otherwise pasted on as a theatrical make-up prosthesis, but they don’t simply replace it with short stature, as Peter Dinklage emphasizes: It’s much more universal about every person who, for whatever reason always, once felt unlovable. You can feel that in every moment in the intensity of his game.
The Sicilian baroque town of Noto as the setting is a world heritage dream, in whose calcareous tuff stone buildings reality becomes the stage and the reality of the scenery flows smoothly into the artificiality of the musical. Joe Wright celebrates the art of writing, the swing of a pen tip, the traces of ink that combine to form words and sentences, the paper that flutters through space in a painterly weightless manner or is moved by a delicate hand. Above all, “Cyrano” is a homage to the arts and creativity, to the poetry of love, to disguise and illusion, beginning with the grand opening scene in the theater to which Joe Wright is particularly attached through growing up in his parents’ puppet theater . As a small homage to this world of wonder, which still inspires him to this day, two wooden marionettes made by his father can be seen very briefly.
Cyrano, UK, Canada, USA, 2021 Director: Joe Wright. Book : Edmond Rostand, Erica Schmidt. Camera: Shamus McGarvey. Starring: Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Ben Mendelsohn. Distribution: Universal Pictures Germany, 124 minutes. Movie release date: March 3, 2022