Cyrano, the musical from Joe Wright (Darkest Hour, Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice) is a finalist for the Best Costume Academy Award 2022, thanks to the work of Italian costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini, also nominated last year for Matteo Garrone’s Pinocchio. With a careful selection of fabrics, the Florentine native gives identity to the clothes, accessories and uniforms of the film’s characters.
The film is a cinematic adaptation of Erica Schmidt’s musical Cyrano, which was based on Cyrano de Bergerac by French dramaturge Edmond Rostand, published and first produced in 1897. The story is well-known: the soldier Christian asks his friend Cyrano for help in winning the heart of the beautiful Roxanne, with whom Cyrano is also secretly in love. The lead character is played by Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones), while Haley Bennett (Music & Lyrics, The Girl on the Train, Hillbilly Elegy) is his impossible love interest Roxanne and Kelvin Harrison Jr. (Luce, Waves) is Christian.
It wasn’t just the costumes with an Italian accent, the setting for the film is entirely Sicilian: “It was very clear to me how to make the film. We needed to create a “bubble” on the island of Sicily, shoot the first three acts in a Baroque city from the late 17th century, Noto, and make use of every corner in that incredible place”, explained the director. Seventeenth-century France, the setting for the story, was thus recreated in Eastern Sicily, in Scicli and Noto, Syracuse, Maniace Castle, and in Catania’s Palazzo Biscari.
Cyrano will be distributed in theatres in Italy by Eagle Pictures on 3 March 2022.