Cyrano, My Love

Paris, 1897. Edmond Rostand has had two flops, has no money and cannot write. Constant Coquelin, the most famous actor of the day, asks him for a new play. Rostand agrees with nothing but a title in hand and says he will write it in three weeks. What he writes is Cyrano de Bergerac. The subject is not genius but panic. Rostand steals from everyone around him as he writes: a friend's love affair, the lines of a waiter in a cafe, the debts of the theatre owner. The famous balcony scene emerges here out of letters he writes on a friend's behalf. The form is backstage comedy: narrow corridors, rehearsal fights, costume crises, creditors constantly interrupting. The tempo is deliberately kept high. The source is Alexis Michalik's own stage play, which he carried to cinema after a large success in France. The events are fiction, not history; there is no record that Rostand wrote the play this way, and the film builds it as a legend. Thomas Solivérès plays Rostand and Olivier Gourmet plays Coquelin. Who it is for: viewers who like backstage stories and fast French comedy. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a real writer's biography; the film invents nearly every detail.