Like a good song that no cover version can destroy, so does Sirano de Bergerek’s play by Admon Rusten, which manages to be brilliant and moving in almost every version and paraphrase he receives, in cinema, on television or on stage. Whether it’s the Sirano of Gerard Depardieu (in the 1990 version, the best so far), or Steve Martin (in ‘Roxanne’ in 1987), or Itai Tiran, in the brilliant stage version staged at the Cameri a few years ago, or Peter Dinklage In the current version currently showing in theaters. There’s a great romantic idea here about the power of words to create emotions and break hearts.
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Rustano Sirano is a warrior poet in 17th century France. He’s a word wizard with a pen and beads, and he excels at sword fights and knives. He has a physical defect that annoys him – in most productions it is a long, clumsy and grotesque nose, which is glued to his face – and makes him, in his own eyes, unworthy of love. But he’s in love over his head with Roxanne, a love he keeps a secret. When Roxanne falls in love with a handsome young soldier named Christian, who serves in Cyrano’s regiment, Cyrano begins to write for him the love letters that will conquer Roxanne’s heart, and he succeeds. Roxanne falls in love with the words she receives in letters, not knowing that she is reading Cyrano’s feelings and statements.
This starting point, for the shy love of a character who does not feel beautiful enough, and for an innocent and platonic courtship through letters and notes, is the reason why quite a few romantic comedies for teenage boys and girls were inspired by him, from the eighties “electronic dreams” to the plethora of teen movies flooding Netflix (“It is permissible to love,” for example). And as mentioned, it always works.
Rustan wrote his play in rhymes, to emphasize that he, just like the protagonist of his play, is a wizard in words (and indeed so). Jean-Paul Rapano, the director of the French film version, kept the rhyming text, in a film that is all verbal acrobatics. In the new version directed by Joe Wright, screenwriter Erica Schmidt, who had previously adapted the original play for a stage version on Off-Broadway, found an alternative solution: songs. The new “Sirano” is a musical, in which the characters do not speak in rhymes, they sing them. The songs, a sequence of depression songs, mostly performed in a baritone voice, were written by brothers Bryce and Aaron Desner, members of the rock band The National (or Taylor Swift’s partners in writing “Folklore,” depending on what year of birth you are).
Despite the wording that underlies the play, “Cyrano de Berzerk” is a text that challenges directors, because at the same time it is also active and dynamic. It starts as a show within a show, with masses of participants in the role of the audience, and ends with a war scene, with the statisticians now soldiers.
And here, as he does once every few years, Joe Wright mentions that he’s an excellent director. The British director of “Atonement” and “Anna Karenina” is now adding “Cyrano” to his collection, as part of a trilogy of literary adaptations of tragic love, and of women who find refuge and solace in their loneliness in the world of fiction and fiction – books or plays. Although not all of his films are equal in quality, in his prime moments Wright is a virtuoso director, presenting a world where love and war interfere with each other, a rhythmic world, which he presents with choreography of dance pieces and camera tricks. “Sirano” is his first musical, but music has been the beating heart of all his films so far.
In Wright’s adaptation of Schmidt’s play, he leaves her original casting for the role of Sirano: Peter Dinklage (“Game of Thrones”). Without a long nose, Dinklage plays a small Cyrano who knows there is no way a woman like Roxanne will ever choose him as a mate. It is a work that asks what is more important – the connection between souls, as it is woven through words, which function as a potion of love, or a physical attraction based on external beauty. Rustan’s work asks the protagonist to look beyond Sirano’s monstrous nose, while Schmidt and Wright’s version wonders whether a person with a physical disability can be considered an object of love. The fact that Schmidt is Dinklage’s life partner, and that she wrote her adaptation especially for him, turns the work that deals with a man’s love letters to a woman, into a woman’s long love letter to her man, and the admission that talent, heart, emotion and soul (and radio voice) become each To the object of desire, no matter what it looks like. And so, “Sirano” – both as a 125-year-old text and as a completely new work – manages to excite again, as if for the first time.