Nez-a-Nez with Vincent Perez

Utterly confused, I moved onto a 'historical' romance, Cyrano de Bergerac. It was great, like a crappy-romance novel on screen, except, uh, French... so all the more romantic? I wasn't sure about it at first, the cover looked kind of cheezy, but the back said that Vincent Perez was in it, so I gleefully popped it in. Vincent Perez is hot. Actually, now he's kind of balding, but back in his early 90s heyday, he was hot. You might know him from Fan Fan La Tulipe, if you saw that a buncha years ago when it came out. I had forgotten him, but I was watching Indochine the other week for my Vietnamese film thing, and he was there and reminded me that I'm in love with him.

Anyway, Cyrano, the poet-slash-foolhardy-army-commander, is in love with his cousin. (These French people... tut tut tut.) He's also Gerard Depadieu, so that gives massive e-props to the film right off. Due to his horrendously large (prosthetic) nose, he doesn't think anyone could possibly love him, so he hides his feelings. One day, Cousin Roxane needs to talk with him urgently, and declares herself in love!... sadly, not with him. She's in love with Christian (aka my cutie-patootie), who will be joining Cy's regiment or whatevs, and could he please keep Chris out of trouble? Also, please tell Chris to write some love letters, even though they've never spoken. Cyrano complies, except, alas! Christian is a dolt and not good at romance. Cyrano thinks, well this is great, and decides to 'help' Christian by writing the letters for him... something about he'll be the mind and Christian will be the face. La la la, the gist of it is, will she ever find out? And WHO will she love?

Honestly, it was pretty corny, story-wise, but also had extremely witty dialogue. Seeing as he was a poet there were lots of word battles and plenty of puns, and y'all know I love my puns. I think it would have been better with a proper understanding of French, because reading the subtitles really took away from the rhyming and overall cleverness... but there was one scene that translated well, where Chris is sort of challenging Cy by interrupting everything he says with a 'nose' phrase, even though Cy generally bans his men from even sneezing. The kissing bits were kind of awkward and hilarious, but I think it was meant to be that way. It was well done because you know that you're meant to be rooting for her to be deep and choose Cy, seeing as she's obviously in love with his brains, but at the same time you can't help rooting for Christian, a) because he is tres sexy and b) because the poor boy is really just a pawn, it was Cyrano's idea to lie to the woman, and she liked him for his looks in the first place. Overall, it's a fun film to watch, but don't expect to feel all wise and arty at the end of it. Just expect to be amused.

Blogger wont let me upload pics, which is really shit. However, in looking for photos, I did discover that Vincent Perez was also in Queen of the Damned - HAHAHA!! Sorry. That was pretty much the worst film ever.