Though he’s already scrambling to meet his three-week deadline to get a finished “Cyrano” up and running, Edmond agrees to strike up a literary seduction campaign with Jeanne in Leo’s stead. You can probably see where this is going.

Leo is in love with a beautiful, idealistic costume designer named Jeanne (Lucie Boujenah), and when the two spot her lounging on a balcony, a hidden Edmond begins to feed his friend romantic lines of verse with which to woo her.

Suddenly granted a lifeline, but with no idea how to flesh out his patched-together pitch into an actual play, Edmond finally finds his inspiration when he’s drawn into a bizarre love triangle with his handsome yet unrefined actor friend Leo (Tom Leeb). He schedules a meeting with the fatuously enthusiastic actor Constant Coquelin (Olivier Gourmet, consuming every ounce of scenery with infectious panache), and though Edmond has yet to write a single line of his new play, he manages to sell Coquelin on it with an improvised draft of “Cyrano’s” famous nose monologue. Fastidiously mustachioed, stubbornly highbrow and eternally agitated, we’re introduced to him as his latest play has just folded, with a passer-by helpfully identifying him to a companion as “a young poet who writes flop plays.” (In a curiously abandoned thread, the struggling playwright tries to console himself with a visit to an early motion picture theater, only to immediately sense the eventual decline of his chosen medium.)Ī few years later, Edmond is facing both mounting debts and writer’s block, while his wife Rosemonde (played by Alice de Lencquesaing, and here depicted as a stock supportive spouse with no indication that she was also a serious poet) finds her onetime admiration of his gifts curdling into impatience.

Part fancifully fictional account of the play’s conception, and part “Waiting for Guffman”-style depiction of the wild antics behind its first production, “Cyrano” was released in France earlier this year, and its undemanding immersion into flashy Belle Époque settings and farcical hijinks with the thinnest topcoat of literary credibility could well earn it an audience Stateside.Īccording to Michalik’s telling, twentysomething playwright Edmond Rostand (Thomas Solivérès) is a talented wordsmith who nonetheless couldn’t be more out of step with the theatrical tastes of 1890s Paris.

As fizzy as a freshly poured glass of Perrier-Jouët, though considerably less complex, writer-director Alexis Michalik’s “Cyrano, My Love” attempts to give the “Shakespeare in Love” treatment to the timeless French play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” with shamelessly derivative yet undeniably entertaining results.

Cyrano de bergerac 2019