Return of The Swashbuckler

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CYRANO DE BERGERAC Directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau

Screenplay by Jean-Paul Rappeneau and Jean-Claude Carriere

Alas, poor Cyrano. For decades he has been little more than a rumor of antique flourishes, known to the mass American audience mainly as the source of Steve Martin's genial little comedy Roxanne. Swordsman and poet, idealist and unrequited lover, born rebel as well as natural nobleman, the hero of Edmond Rostand's great romantic play is not, face it, a figure calculated to inspire a nonromantic age. One does not suppose, for example, that he figures very largely in George Bush's inner life. Or, for that matter, Jesse Jackson's.

But we have all been the poorer for this. And we are infinitely the richer for his sudden and glorious reincarnation by Gerard Depardieu in Jean-Paul Rappeneau's faithful and generous adaptation of Rostand's work. For the film not only restores this splendid spirit to his rightful place in our consciousness but also redeems a virtually abandoned cinematic tradition.

In their formative years, the movies took over the manner of Rostand's 19th ; century kind of theater, which was melodramatic in construction and spectacular in style, and actually improved on its substance, since film could realistically show splendors that the stage could only suggest. This Cyrano, abustle with action, aflame with rhetoric and spiced with humorous contempt for pompous and hypocritical swells, reminds us of a lost movie genre that, paradoxically, the original Cyrano helped inspire.

This movie also reminds us that there was a lot of its eponymous hero in the swashbuckling screen characters of Douglas Fairbanks, the young John Barrymore and Errol Flynn. All of them improbably and delightfully blended the manners of the cavalier, the morality of the populist and, in those rare moments when they paused for reflection, the mooniness of adolescence.

There is, of course, more to Cyrano than there was to, say, Flynn's Robin Hood or Fairbanks' Zorro. Immortally, he is a man with a hero's moves but not a hero's looks. He is afflicted with a nose that is kindly described as heroic, and unkindly (and more commonly) thought to be simply grotesque -- and hugely comical. It accounts for his hair-trigger temperament. It also accounts for his melancholy, because it prevents him from speaking his love for his cousin Roxane (spunky, winsome Anne Brochet). Until, that is, she becomes enamored of handsome, tongue-tied Christian (Vincent Perez), who employs Cyrano to speak for him in letters, and from the shadows beneath her balcony.

What opportunities for wistful gallantry this presents the actor who plays Cyrano, and how tenderly Depardieu seizes them. His peasant frame is the perfect support for that nose, which seems less a theatrical device, more a natural outgrowth of Cyrano's spirit than it does when puttied on more lissome leading men. Depardieu's Cyrano has a slowness and stubbornness that make one realize how willed his dashing public personality is, how much it is a way of deflecting attention from a self he finds shameful. This imparts a particular poignancy to the final sequence, in which he at last unmasks his yearning soul to Roxane and confronts death not with swirling cape and whirling sword but with a sweet and welcoming comic gravity.

The actor's spirit and the director's are perfectly attuned. Rappeneau's production might be termed a swashbuckler noir -- in love with the play of movement, the play of light and shadow and, above all, the play of language. The wit, care and subtle style of this film are reflected in the fact that for / its English subtitles it uses Anthony Burgess's translation, in which many of the lines gently, uninsistently, rhyme.