[FILM]
CYRANO
Dancing around each other: Roxanne (Haley Bennett) and Cyrano (Peter Dinklage.)
★★★
OUT 14 JANUARY CERT TBC / 124 MINS
DIRECTOR Joe Wright
CAST Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Ben Mendelsohn
PLOT Lovelorn poet/soldier Cyrano (Dinklage) is unable to express his deeply buried feelings for childhood pal Roxanne (Haley Bennett). When she falls for Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr), Cyrano is devastated, but, wanting Roxanne to be happy, helps his romantic rival pen love-letters to woo his own crush.
JOE WRIGHT’S CYRANO opens on a beautifully framed image of a marionette. After his mishandled attempt at noir-y thriller The Woman In The Window, the director, whose parents ran a puppet theatre, has returned to more solid, fruitful ground, ironically by embracing his more experimental side: a musical adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, based on Erica Schmidt’s 2018 stage show, scored by The National and shot during the pandemic in Sicily. It might be more eccentric than engaging and it can’t escape the yarn’s well-worn contours, but it’s regularly inventive, lush-as-anything, and grounded by a charismatic Peter Dinklage performance.