Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Cyrano de Bergerac
1990 · Jean-Paul Rappeneau · Cyrano de Bergerac on Sightlines
He fights in rhyme. Before the duel he announces how it will end, at the close of the envoi I strike, then composes the ballade while fencing and lands the last line and the point on the same beat. The surface joke is that he does two hard things at once. The better joke is that the poem has become the timer for the sword. Nothing in it is improvised and all of it looks improvised, which is close to a working definition of panache.
Rappeneau's invention lives in that scene, and it isn't fidelity. The 1950 screen version had already proved that Rostand's alexandrines could carry a feature, and had fixed the alternation of swordplay set-piece and balcony serenade that Rappeneau reworks. What Rappeneau and Jean-Claude Carrière added was motion. They kept the rhymed verse almost entire, then refused to let it sit still: Pierre Lhomme's camera glides through the packed playhouse of the opening and tracks the duels, and Noëlle Boisson cuts to the speed of Depardieu's delivery rather than to the meter. The verse isn't recited. It's carried. That gamble is why the thing moves like a film instead of standing there like a record of a play.
Bazin's old argument about filmed theater is the right frame. The failure mode, he thought, is disguising the play, opening it out and apologizing for the text. Leave the text sovereign and let cinema supply a different kind of space around it. Cyrano is nearly a demonstration. The language is untouched; the space around it is a playhouse, a balcony in the dark, a siege line at Arras.
Deleuze is useful here for one specific reason. His name for most of what cinema does is the movement-image: someone perceives a situation, acts, and the situation changes. Cyrano is a virtuoso of that circuit, able to fix any room with a blade or a sentence. But Deleuze also marks a stranger case, the Figure, or reflection-image, where an action gets transposed into spectacle or discourse instead of being carried out. The nose tirade is the pure instance. Handed the occasion for violence, Cyrano produces a cascade of improvised insults against his own face, beating every possible mocker to it, and the attack he mounts is on himself. The wound is real. The answer is a performance about the wound.
Naming that earns its keep, because it locates what is peculiar about this hero. He isn't blocked. Deleuze's postwar figures can't act because action has stopped working; Cyrano can act and declines to, converting the act into language. The film says as much in its own terms. Panache is grace in the face of futility, the willingness to be magnificent when it changes nothing: an action-image at full power, cut loose from consequence.
Deleuze borrows from Brecht a word for a posture that exposes a whole relation rather than advancing a plot. He calls it the gest. Panache is Cyrano's gest, and Depardieu's achievement is to make it double. He plays the wit as armor bolted over a wound, so the bravado and the heartbreak are legible in the same instant. Watch the bulk of him move. The body has to be that large for the gest to carry to the back of the house.
The faces do something more precise. Deleuze splits the close-up into two poles: the reflecting face, a unified contour expressing one quality such as wonder or admiration, and the intensive face, dominated by a feature that breaks the contour and generates a series. Vincent Perez's Christian is the first, a beautiful surface into which Roxane reads a soul, and he knows it, and that knowledge is the part of the performance that stings. Cyrano is the second. One feature owns his face, and the tirade is that feature run through variations until it becomes a catalogue. Lhomme's torch-lit Baroque lighting keeps both poles live by pulling faces out of shadow, so beauty and deformity are lit by the same flame.
Then the balcony, the film's great formal event. In modern cinema Deleuze tracks a split between what you see and what you hear: voices detached from the bodies that should own them, sound and image telling two stories, an image that has to be deciphered rather than followed. Rappeneau gets that split with no modernist apparatus at all. He stages it. Christian stands in the light under Roxane's window, Cyrano stands in the dark and speaks, and the staging's vertical separation makes the gap architectural. Roxane, who cannot see, hears the truth and assigns it to the wrong flesh. We can see both, which means we spend the scene reading the image against its own soundtrack. English-language audiences got an extra turn of the screw: Anthony Burgess's rhyming subtitles made this a film you literally read while watching, verse running beneath the image as a second track.
Extend the balcony and you have the letters, and the letters are the object the whole film condenses into. Deleuze's forger creates truth instead of reporting it. Cyrano forges a lover, a composite man who never existed, and the forgery turns out to hold the only real feeling in the story. The cruelty of the last act isn't that Roxane was deceived. It's that she wasn't. She loved the right person the whole time and had the wrong address.
The craft debts are specific. The Earrings of Madame de... supplies the model for Lhomme's camera, gliding and continually reframing bodies inside deep costumed rooms. Les Enfants du Paradis supplies the shape of the whole enterprise, a French cinema built on stagecraft and heightened literary speech with a doomed lover of great panache at its center. The duels come down from the Technicolor swashbuckler, Robin Hood's athletic fencing shot in unbroken space and Scaramouche's marathon theater duel, which is what lets the ballad-duel stay geographically legible while the rhyme runs. And Carrière, who spent years compressing literary material for Buñuel without betraying its voice, is why a canonical verse play became shootable rather than embalmed.
What it did was make the most stylized material imaginable enormously popular. It swept the Césars, won Depardieu the actor prize at Cannes, took an Oscar for its costumes, traveled everywhere, and became the flagship of the French heritage revival by proving that classical theatrical language could be reanimated on film instead of preserved under glass.
So next time, don't watch Depardieu during the balcony scene. Watch Perez, a man standing in the light being loved for words that aren't his, obliged to hold still while it happens. And keep one question open, because the film does. Is Cyrano's silence nobility or vanity? Panache never answers. It only makes the refusal beautiful enough that you stop asking until the last act arrives and asks for you.
Concepts in play
- The Figure (reflection-image) — The nose tirade, where Cyrano answers provocation with 'a cascade of insults against himself' rather than the blade, and the ballad-duel that composes verse while fencing ('à la fin de l'envoi, je touche') — action arriving as performed figure instead of direct act.
- The gest — Panache as the film's governing value — 'grace and courage in the face of futility, the willingness to be magnificent even when it changes nothing' — carried in Depardieu's bearing, where he plays 'wit as armor over wound, so that the bravado and the heartbreak are legible at once.'
- Reflexive vs intensive face — Perez's Christian as the reflecting contour, 'the necessary beauty and vulnerability — a man aware that he is loved for words not his own,' set against Cyrano's face owned by one feature and serialized in the tirade; Lhomme's candle-and-torchlit Baroque lighting, 'where faces emerge from shadow,' keeps both poles available.
- Audiovisual disjunction (lectosign) — The balcony scene, 'staged to exploit shadow and vertical separation, dramatizing the gap between the beautiful surface (Christian) and the hidden voice (Cyrano)' — the visible body and the speaking voice belong to two men; reinforced internationally by Burgess's rhyming subtitles, which made the image carry a second readable track.
- The forger — Cyrano ghost-writing love to Roxane on Christian's behalf, composing a lover who does not exist, with the narrative withholding the truth 'almost sadistically' until the final act — a forgery that produces the film's only real feeling.
- Symbol (object condensing the relation) — The ghost-written letters, which make 'the whole film function as one long, unspoken confession'; language as 'simultaneously the hero's gift, his disguise, and his prison.'
- Respiration-space — The film 'pairs the intimacy of a chamber romance with the scale of massed battle scenes, crowded theaters, and Baroque interiors,' with Boisson's editing marshalling the Arras siege into coherent geography before the film contracts again to a whispered scene under a window.