A light-hearted and entertaining film that recounts – in a highly fictionalized way – the genesis of France's greatest theatrical success, written at the end of the 29th century by a little more than unknown 20.000-year-old from Marseilles and since then performed XNUMX times in theaters around the world. Cyrano mon amour (“Edmond” is the original title), a film by the young transalpine director Alexis Michalik inspired by the theatrical comedy Cyrano de Bergerac, replicates exactly what Edmond Rostand was asked at the time: to make people laugh, at a time when the French public asked for and got this from acclaimed rivals Eugene Labiche and Georges Feydeau. And do it in verse and not in prose, since the author by his own admission is capable of writing only in poetic form and, moreover, up to that moment he had written only redundant tragedies.
The film therefore lightens a totem of French culture, just as Rostand's Cyrano lightened the French theater at the time, astonishing the Parisian public in the winter of 1897: if the author's fear was that of yet another fiasco, of a play that was too long and weighty as those he had written in the past, the success has instead been resounding since the première at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, a theater that still exists, in the X arrondissement of the French capital. The piece makes you laugh, as well as the film, deliberately sparkling, which immerses the viewer in the euphoric and creative climate of the Belle Epoque, but without exaggerating with intellectual references and quotations. The first part is the more romantic one, where all the author's artistic and human talent and sensitivity emerges, while the second is more dynamic and in the end almost flows into a modern comedy.
To enjoy the refined rhymes and sounds of the French language, the film should be seen in the original version if possible, also to understand the communicative canons of the time, when the language was even more baroque and pompous than the one the French use today (all' era the "voi" was used, which is equivalent to our "lei", even between friends and relatives) and what Rostand knew how to adapt to an opera that is both romantic and comic. However, there have been some criticisms for the excessive personal review by the director, who seems to have been inspired by the film Shakespeare in Love, starting from the idea that Rostand conceived Cyrano inspired by real life situations and known characters.
Some French critics reproached the director too many inconsistencies: Rostand did not write Cyrano in three weeks; his wife was not only a housewife jealous of her husband, but an established poet and playwright (this aspect is just mentioned); Ravel's Bolero, which resonates in the sequence in which the comedians decide not to respect the law by going on stage anyway, was composed many years later, even if the musical background in this case can be considered a cinematographic choice and is not performed by the actors in scene. So it's not a film for expert cinephiles, but it's not always the historical truth that counts: in the end, the film works because poetic licence, fun and feelings win out.
