Roxanne (1987)

Absolutely Fantastic

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This isn't a knock on the American people, but for those who may know the actual Cyrano de Bergerac story (the one this is solely based on), with all the effort in the world to give into it this film can only come across as forced, and a hollow reinterpretation of the myth as a mainstream American disposable comedy.Steve Martin does well at times with the dialog (like the famous 'big nose' tirade, in the bar here), but it's just too obvious what he's trying to do, and the entire narrative is too obvious; and although Steve Martin is certainly very pure at heart as a man, and this is another one of his outlets of how much romanticism and sensitivity he has in him, it just falls way short really in the end. Just not convincing, too obvious.It's not awful though but 4/10 as it barely gives the original any original added value.

Steve Martin is a treasure in ROXANNE. This retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac is imbued with some great shtick (expected), as well as some real tenderness (unexpected). Darryl Hannah is charming and Rick Rossovich exudes sex appeal, which sharply contrasts Martin's character due to his proboscis. Shelley Duvall rounds out the main cast, sticking her nose into Martin's love life.The motion picture was filmed in Nelson, British Columbia, where my family vacationed one summer. It's refreshing to see something not made entirely on a studio back lot but in a real town and inside real old-style houses. I have wondered why a sequel was never made, but nobody nose.

This small movie, a modern take on the Cyrano de Bergerac story, was filmed in the sleepy little community of Nelson, B.C., located in foothills just about 30 miles north of the USA border where Washington and Montana meet. Just beautiful country.Steve Martin is C. D. Bales, 40-ish, everyone knows him in this town, and carefully avoid any references to his loooong nose. He also is the volunteer fire chief, with a mostly hapless crew. Even the rescue of a treed cat doesn't go very smoothly.One day a scientist, 25-ish Astronomer Daryl Hannah as Roxanne shows up for the summer, with her telescope. She is studying what she believes will be a new comet and is excited by the prospects. C.D. quickly becomes a distant admirer, but naturally believes his nose and his age prevent anything from developing.Meanwhile the town gets a new fire professional, Rick Rossovich as Chris. He is a good firefighter but otherwise pretty stupid and so shy with women that he throws up at the prospects of talking to someone like Roxanne. But Roxanne finds him cute, and takes an interest.The middle of the movie has C.D. agreeing to write letters to Roxanne with Chris's signature. They contain beautiful words, because they are C.D.'s own feelings about Roxanne, who then falls in love, she thinks, with Chris, but is really falling in love with C.D.'s words. The movie works because Steve Martin is such a good actor. We see little to none of his trademark slapstick style, instead he plays it as a serious role, appropriately, but there are a few funny scenes.Overall an oldie but a goodie, a nice diversion from today's violent and/or rude and crude movies. SPOILERS: Shallow Chris runs off with a cute and shallow bar maid, bound for Reno, while Roxanne finds out that C.D. had written all those letters. In spite of the 15-year age difference they seem perfect for each other.

Edmond Rostand's 1897 verse play "Cyrano de Bergerac" is often described as a tragi-comedy because, although it contains many comic elements, it ends tragically. Steve Martin, however, clearly thought that the basic story would work equally well as a pure comedy, and relocated it to a contemporary setting in small-town America. Martin himself plays the Cyrano figure, Charlie "CD" Bales, the local fire chief. Like Rostand's character, he is witty, acrobatic, charming and intelligent but has a very large nose. Rostand's Roxane becomes a pretty young female astronomer named Roxanne (the etymologically incorrect but more normal spelling in English). The third member of the triangle, Christian, becomes Chris, a handsome but dim-witted and inarticulate member of Charlie's team. The love-triangle plot is essentially the same as Rostand's. Charlie is in love with Roxanne, but feels unable to pursue her because he is very self-conscious about his nose. Roxanne falls for Chris, not only because of his looks but also because she believes him to be romantic and intelligent, not realising that the love letters which he used to win her heart were actually written for him by Charlie.The term "romantic comedy" is often used to mean any boy-meets-girl love story with a happy ending, regardless of whether or not it is particularly humorous. "Roxanne" meets the standard Hollywood rom-com formula; it is a boy-meets-girl love story which ends happily after the obstacles to their love (Charlie's self-consciousness about his looks, Roxanne's infatuation with Chris) have been overcome. This, however, is a romantic comedy where the comedy is at least as important as the romance, and it is often brilliantly funny. The two scenes which stood out for me were the "Twenty Nose Insults" speech, where Charlie uses his wit and skill with words to put down a lout who has insulted him in a bar, and the scene where the hopelessly clumsy and oafish Chris tries to woo Roxanne using Charlie's words, relayed to him via a radio link. At his worst Steve Martin can be a rather annoying actor, but at his best he is a comic genius with a verbal dexterity reminiscent of the great Robin Williams, and he is certainly at his best here. Daryl Hannah still appears to be working in the cinema and television, but she is not the big name she once was, and few of her films from this century, apart from the two "Kill Bill" episodes, have attracted much attention. In her twenties and thirties, however, she was regarded as a rising star, even though with her lanky, boyish figure and long face she did not really have the classical looks of a Hollywood goddess. (I don't think having a boy's name really helped her either; I often wondered why she didn't simply reverse the order of her names to become the more obviously feminine Hannah Daryl). As with Martin the standard of her acting was variable, but here, as she had done in "Splash" three years earlier, she makes a sweet, charming and unaffected romantic comedy heroine, playing a woman who is not only attractive but also educated and intelligent without resorting to that old "bespectacled bluestocking" cliché. Mention should also be made of Rick Rossovich who gives a good comic performance as Chris. In the eighties he was seen as another promising newcomer but quickly dropped off the radar; the last role I saw him in was a bit part in that dire superhero spoof "Black Scorpion II", made less than a decade after this film. Shelley Duvall is also good as Roxanne's friend Dixie. Fred Schepisi is clearly a versatile director who can work in various film genres. I originally associated him with true-life crime dramas like "The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith" and "A Cry in the Dark", both set in his native Australia, but he has also turned his hand to comedy. "IQ" (another American rom-com) and "Fierce Creatures" (a British sort-of- sequel to "A Fish Called Wanda") are other examples, but "Roxanne" is probably his best. It is shot against some striking scenery- the town is supposed to be somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, although the film was actually shot across the Canadian border in British Columbia- and features a masterly comic performance from Martin with good contributions from the rest of the cast. This is one of the funniest, and best, romantic comedies of the eighties. 8/10