ABSTRACT

With his notorious nose, his finesse with verse and épée, his heart-wrenching vulnerability and, above all, his panache, Cyrano de Bergerac remains one of the great heroes of the French theatre. An oft-cited study names Cyrano (followed by Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean and Alexandre Dumas’ d’Artagnan) as the favourite French literary character. 1 With its five grandiose settings and a huge cast led by international star Gérard Depardieu in the title role, Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s 1990 epic Cyrano de Bergerac harnesses the hero’s iconic status to dramatize French identity and masculinity on a grand scale. Adapting Edmond Rostand’s quintessential theatrical work into contemporary cinematic spectacle, this film precipitated a subsequent cycle of lavish ‘super productions’ which dramatized the glorious national past through the adaptation of famous French cultural texts.