Toby MacDonald’s Old Boys (2018)

Toby MacDonald’s first feature is a quirky remake of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, set in Caldermount public school for boys in the 1980s with the bespectacled and very young-looking scholarship boy Amberson (Alex Lawther) playing Cyrano for the dim but dashing Christian as Winchester (Jonah Hauer-King). The subject of the love of both of them, in other words the 1980s Roxane, is Agnès (Pauline Etienne), the daughter of the French teacher Babinot (Denis Ménochet overplaying like mad). Taking the place of the poems at the beginning are home-made video cassettes, begun by Agnès who sends Winchester one of a pastiche of Bob Dylan's famous casting away of cue cards, only it's not 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' (1965) playing but updated to Plastic Bertrand's 'Ça plane pour moi' (1977).

All this is acted out against the macho atmosphere of bullying, hazing (tipping pails of water on heads and dunking in the toilet) and a bizarre sports ritual resembling rugby but called Streamers and played in a river. Lawther plays brilliantly, and Hauer-King and Etienne are fine, but most of the other cast seem to be taking things to farcical levels and the main plot often gets entangled or suspended in the violent macho ethos. There is a good idea hovering around, but it gets lost in the mêlée. It's not worth the time.

Paris 2017: Cimetière de Passy: Rosemonde Gérard

Rosemonde Gérard (1866–1953) was the wife of the writer Edmond Rostand (1868–1918), whose grave in Marseille I showed here. She too was an acclaimed writer, notably for her poetical works – Les Pipeaux (1889) and L’Arc-en-Ciel (1926).

Edmond and Rosemonde's son Maurice Rostand (1891–1968), poet and novelist, is also buried here. His mémoire Confession d'un demi-siècle (1948) is one of his most well-known works, and his L'Homme que j'ai tué (1925) was adapted to cinema by Ernst Lubitsch as Broken Lullaby (1932) and by François Ozon as Frantz (2016).

Cimetière Saint-Pierre, Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône (13) #2: Edmond Rostand

'JOSEPH-ALEXIS

EDMOND ROSTAND

COMMANDEUR

DE LA LÉGION D'HONNEUR

MEMBRE DE L'ACADÉMIE

FRANÇAISE

NÉ À MARSEILLE

LE 1^ER AVRIL 1868

DÉDÉDÉ À PARIS

LE 2 DÉCEMBRE 1918'

No specific mention of Rostand being a writer, and in particular of the hugely successful play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). His son, the writer and biologist Jean Rostand (1894–1977), was the product of Edmond's marriage to the poet Rosemonde Gérard (1866–1953).