In an age of algorithms and borrowed voices, the imperfect, human stories we share may be
what keep us connected.
Last Saturday morning, I was weeding a flowerbed in Hancock, New Hampshire. The only sounds were birdsong, which called back a line I had not thought about in years: "You love the little birds? How kind of you to build this bower for their little claws to rest in."
The line comes from the opening scene of Jean-Paul Rappeneau's 1990 film Cyrano de Bergerac, based on Edmond Rostand's 1897 play of the same name. A young actor's pompous performance infuriates Cyrano. Uninvited and utterly unconcerned with the consequences, he interrupts the play and delivers, in a single unbroken breath, a dazzling cascade of insults about his own enormous nose—so devastating and so funny that the entire theater falls silent before erupting in applause. It is one of the greatest displays of verbal swordsmanship in Western literature. Though Cyrano appears to mock another, every joke ultimately circles back to his own deepest insecurity.
These days, I am fortunate enough to spend much of my time moving between gardens in the Monadnock region of New Hampshire: tending to flower beds in Hancock, Peterborough, and Nelson. Perhaps that is precisely why the film returned to me. There is something about communing with the earth —about rooting and uprooting—that calls forth memories long planted within us. The recollection arrived unexpectedly, and with it, a quiet delight.
A few years ago, a new generation rediscovered Cyrano when Peter Dinklage starred in Erica Schmidt’s musical adaptation of the classic play. That production reminded me instead of the adaptation that first captured my imagination: Jean-Paul Rappeneau's magnificent 1990 film, with Gérard Depardieu in one of the great performances of his career, and of Roxanne (1987), Steve Martin's witty American retelling of the same story. Each version asks the same question: can someone believe themselves worthy of love when they are convinced their greatest flaw is the first thing the world sees?
That is the paradox of Cyrano: his weapon is his wit, and he wields it with unrivaled brilliance. Yet beneath that brilliance lies someone far more tender. He becomes convinced that his large nose disqualifies him from being loved. So, when the woman he adores falls for Christian—a handsome but tongue-tied young cadet—Cyrano does not confess his feelings. Instead, he hides behind Christian's face, writing the letters that Christian delivers and, under the cover of darkness, whispering the words beneath Roxane's balcony.
He lends another man his own voice—the very voice with which Roxane falls in love.
In that scene beneath the balcony, Cyrano admits something he has almost certainly never said aloud before: that he has always hidden his heart behind his wit, out of fear. His cleverness has been his armor all along. Only in the darkness, unseen and borrowing another man's face, does he finally lay his heart bare.
And it very nearly works. Roxane falls deeply in love—with the voice, though she believes it belongs to another man's face.
Only at the end of the play, as Cyrano lies dying, does she finally understand the truth: it was his soul she had loved all along. Reading his final letter, she realizes that the voice she cherished was always his. She describes his letters this way: "Each separate page was like a flower petal, plucked from your soul, and sent wafting into mine."
Her words recall the imagery of the Song of Songs, where love is expressed through gardens, flowers, fountains, and growing things: "I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys" (2:1); "A garden enclosed... a fountain sealed" (4:12). In both works, love speaks in living, rooted particulars. Borrowed language—even when beautiful—cannot do the same, because it has no roots in the heart from which it comes.
To this day, what has stayed with me has very little to do with seventeenth-century Paris, and quite a lot to do with the summer of 2026.
There is, I think, a compelling argument for leaving the house and joining the community rather than remaining at home with a screen and an algorithm. A film watched alone on a device, curated especially for you, is a private experience—pleasant, perhaps, but solitary. A film watched in a dark theater with friends, neighbors, and strangers becomes something else entirely: a shared emotional experience. Everyone gasps at the same moment. Everyone laughs—or doesn't—together. And when the lights come up, you leave changed alongside the people who shared those two hours with you. That shared experience—that fleeting sense of connection—is something no algorithm, no matter how well it knows your tastes, can replicate.
We are, all of us, being offered a great many masks—and, with them, borrowed voices. It is easier than ever to let something else write our words for us — to let an algorithm smooth the edges off a text message, a wedding toast, a love letter, until it says something plausible and pleasant and true of no and to no one in particular. AI can mimic the form of feeling; it can produce a sentence shaped exactly like longing. What it cannot replicate is the lived experience from which longing arises.
In Book Twelve of War and Peace, Pierre Bezukhov finds himself sharing a prisoner-of-war shed with Platon Karataev, a peasant whose quiet wisdom changes the way Pierre interprets the world. Tolstoy writes that Karataev's simple, plainspoken sayings, "taken without a context seem so insignificant, but when used appositely suddenly acquire a significance of profound wisdom." Elsewhere, Karataev remarks that "a word void of comprehension is meaningless." Together, the two observations suggest that words derive their deepest meaning not from their elegance alone, but from the life and soul of their author.
When we rely on machines to develop and produce our thoughts, the words they generate are, in a sense, beyond comprehension: they do not emerge from lived experience. In doing so, we risk losing what we truly love about one another—the imperfections that make us human. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story The Birthmark speaks directly to this tension, exploring the danger of trying to perfect what is inherently already perfect in its very imperfection.
Tragically, Cyrano’s story insists on two truths that he cannot bring himself to believe at the same time: that he is imperfect, and that he is worthy of love.
I grew up in Concord when it was still a small New England town with a single-screen movie theater called Cinema 93, run for decades by Barry Steelman, who possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of film and a genuine devotion to bringing foreign and classic movies to a community that might otherwise never have encountered them. I do not know, as I write this, whether that was where I first saw the 1990 French adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, starring Gérard Depardieu at the height of his powers. I am still trying to track that down. But I know this: I am grateful to have grown up somewhere that made room for something so specific, so human, and so resistant to easy consumption. Access to experiences like that was never something to take for granted. I am not sure we can afford to take it for granted now.
I have long held to a habit I picked up somewhere along the way: staying culturally alive means making room for at least one film a month in a language other than your own. This month, let Cyrano de Bergerac be your pick. The 1990 Depardieu version is available to rent for a few dollars. If subtitles are not your thing, watch Roxanne, Steve Martin’s 1987 American adaptation, instead.
But if you can, watch it somewhere other than your couch.
Places like the Wilton Town Hall Theatre, which has welcomed audiences since 1912, still exist for exactly this reason. So does the Peterborough Community Theatre, New Hampshire’s oldest continuously operating movie house, and The Park Theatre in Jaffrey, restored after fifteen years of community effort so that the town could once again gather beneath one roof. In Keene, The Colonial Theatre continues its summer classics series, filling seats for films that first captivated audiences decades ago.
These are not simply nostalgic relics. They are among the remaining places where a community can gather to experience the same story at the same moment—to laugh, to grieve, to sit in silence, and to leave carrying something shared.
Both Cyrano de Bergerac and Roxanne end the way Cyrano’s story always has: with someone finally seen for exactly who they are, and loved for it. Perhaps that is the lesson we need most now—not perfection, not polish, not borrowed voices, but the courage to be fully and imperfectly ourselves, together.
--
Amelia Clune is a writer and educator based in Nelson, New Hampshire.
