Edmund Rostand’s 1897 play, based on the life of Cyrano de Bergerac, has provided the backdrop for many films over the years, and I am sure the play’s themes of love, friendship, difference, artistic drive, and unrequited love are well-known to most readers of this. So, how do you adapt Rostand’s play into something new and fresh? Maybe Toby MacDonald and Joe Wright have the answer in Old Boys and Cyrano.
In 2018, BAFTA award-winning short filmmaker Toby MacDonald gave the tale of Cyrano de Bergerac a fresh coat of paint in Old Boys, a delightful British indie movie with a talented young cast and a witty, engaging screenplay that, sadly, flew under the radar.
In Old Boys, MacDonald explores the classic themes of Rostand’s play while adding layers of discussion on coming-of-age, isolation, and the need for belonging in adolescence. The resulting movie would tread similar ground to 10 Things I Hate About You but would also find its own unique voice by exploring Rostand’s classic work within the restrictive walls of a British boarding school. Old Boys is a love letter to simpler times when smartphones, email and digital media didn’t dictate teenage communication and a cutting dissection of the imperialism and class divide still present in 80s Britain.
MacDonald’s movie finds its fresh voice through its location. Here, we explore platonic, hidden, and unrequited love within a British boarding school environment – a stifled, testosterone-driven world that shuns ideas of love, respect and kindness in favour of bravado and bullying. In Old Boys’ privilege, place, and power are disfigurements that shape opportunity, respect, and love.
A genuinely exceptional cast sits at the heart of this tender, sweet, yet politically and socially conscious comedy. Alex Lawther’s awkward, intelligent, and loving Amberson is spellbinding, while Jonah Hauer-King’s lovable, misunderstood, but spoiled Winchester is superb. Both young men are from different sides of the tracks, hiding from one another yet needing each other all the same. Meanwhile, in Pauline Etienne’s Angus, we have a strong female character who longs for freedom through creativity and seeks release from the social control of a male-dominated world.
Old Boys wears its heart on its sleeve throughout, with some cracking comedy. However, it is within Macdonald’s reflections on the bumbling nature of teenage love, virginity, and emerging self-confidence in a class-driven society of damaging social divides that Old Boys shines.
Three years later, Joe Wright would revisit Edmund Rostand’s play, capturing the delicate sentimentality of passion throughout the ages. Wright’s musical adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac distilled everything he had learned up to that point into a pure essence of Wrightian romanticism.
Quick-witted, charming knave Cyrano (Peter Dinklage) has always loved Roxanne (Hayley Bennett). Still, the prejudice around his appearance keeps him from confessing, and he instead reluctantly assists beautiful-but-banal Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) in wooing her so that their words may still find meaning in her heart. Only someone as skilful as Peter Dinklage could perform such a conflict between Cyrano’s charmingly youthful candour and the gaze of a thousand-year-old soul, with the two trapped in the constant battle for the true heart of this lovable rogue.
The trio of Dinklage, Bennett, and Harrison Jr. is marvellous to watch as they engage in passionate repartee, sparking such fierce chemistry that one should be wearing safety goggles. They dance through playfulness, joy, and melancholy like a simple waltz, flagrantly showing off their incredible talent.
Wright created what can only be described as the ultimate ballad of unrequited love, with such rich sincerity that it beckons to the age of the Romantics as a clear source of influence. He paints his world with colour, the autumnal hues and glowing rays of light glistening incandescently. Entire rooms are suffused with radiant azures and quiet hazels, the inner sanctum of our troupe’s emotions reflected upon them across the walls, floors, and ceilings. A beguiling poem of unrequited love, sprawling out at once like a saga and an intimate whisper between two lifelong friends. Cyrano is a masterpiece of filmmaking from an already legendary director.
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