Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12602 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-10-31
• Rating: Universal, suitable for all
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 138 minutes

Synopsis
Cyrano De Bergerac: a long nosed, romantic, suffers when his love for cousin Roxanne remains unrequited. Based on the play by Edmond Rostand.

Customer Reviews

Cyrano de Bergerac
Be warned! The subtitles on this release are awful! Only half of the dialogue has been transcribed into subtitles! If you love this film & don't speak fluent French you will be climbing the walls with frustration as you notice that line after line is not subtitled, compared to the full and complete subtitling available on the Taratn Video DVD edition. Buy that one instead! The 5 stars are for the film itself, which is a solid-gold masterpiece.

One of the high water marks of French cinema
Jean-Paul Rappeneau's wonderfully cinematic version of Cyrano De Bergerac is one of the genuine high water marks of modern French cinema. Rappeneau is a director who really understands movement, and his far from static approach revitalizes the piece and frees it from the tyranny of the wonderful words to give it wings, while Gerard Depardieu's magnificent Cyrano keeps the film's emotions beautifully grounded. For once the supporting characters aren't played as idiots: Christian is no fool, merely an inarticulate man increasingly aware that his is a false victory, and the Comte De Guiche is allowed more dignity than you'd expect from a part that's usually reduced to mere comedy villainy.

Almost everything about the film is perfect, from Rappeneau and Jean-Claude Carriere's superb screenplay to Jean-Claude Petit's restrained score, which subtly underlines the emotions rather than play up the pathos (a shame his action cues use a thinly-disguised version of Danny Elfman's Batman theme: someone obviously fell in love with the temp track). Wonderful stuff, even if Cyrano takes longer to shuffle off this mortal coil than Brando did in Mutiny on the Bounty.

This is the one to get!
The DVD from 2000 is very disappointing from a technical point of view, but this is a great improvement (it goes without saying that the film is wonderful). I had the earlier one and gladly replaced it with this and I'm here to spread the good news...