Stephen Williams’ American biographical period drama Chevalier tells the story of Joseph Bologne, the titular Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a magnificent violinist, and a biracial maestro in a France not yet accepting of the ‘mulatto.’ It follows Bologne (Kelvin Harrison Jr) as he acquires repute and fame for his musical prowess, gains and then loses the favour of Marie-Antoinette (Lucy Boynton), the Queen of France, and battles for the director’s position for the Paris Opera, which is eventually unready to listen to a Black man. Interwoven with this is a bittersweet but clearly ill-fated love with Marie-Josephine (Samara Weaving), the married Marquise of Montalembert, and the beginnings of the French Revolution that was to send up the French monarchy in flames.
Chevalier (English)
The setting of the period drama, as behoves one of its nature, is lush and the costuming is gorgeous. The filming has decidedly not strayed from France, perhaps to Europe at the very most. This serves the movie well, centring it in space and time from the get-go with recognisable visual elements.
Here, however, the periodicity of the period drama ends when the screenplay takes its own tour through modern tropes of storytelling. At times, the movie seems like an odd pastiche of period drama and a tale of musical competition that could verily be set in a high school or college. Is Marie Antoinette the Queen of France or the undependable but highly decorative head of the theatre club?
The dialogues are immaturely composed and the narrative weaves through a familiar landscape for recent anti-racist films — a surprise since it is decidedly supposed to be a good century or two behind the times. But despite this, to much surprise, the movie is thoroughly enjoyable, especially as the pace picks up towards the end like an ascending crash of violins.
It’s also perhaps the highly charming and likeable lead actor whose character evolution is shown quite decently although he doesn’t collect much audience sympathy until halfway through the film. The slights and the racism directed at him are depicted with no subtlety.
Again, some of these barbs are more modern than contemporary to his time. For example, La Guimard chides him saying “Go back to where you came from.” This is a typical anti-immigrant barb in the United States of today. Especially painful are the insults calling him a monkey and a party trick, but this is undercut by the dramatic nature of the showdown. Further, Bologne blames his mother for abandoning him, as if she were not a slave on a plantation in Guadeloupe with hardly any agency of her own.
There is a slight Bridgerton-esque liberty with the period aspect of the period drama, a venture also attempted in 2023’s Persuasion, to my great personal chagrin.
With the mild immaturity of the script, I was half afraid that the Chevalier’s move towards the French Revolution would be portrayed as an effect of his dual betrayal by two white women as if it were an ancient retelling of modern anti-racist war. Thankfully, the director made the French Revolution more than a personal man’s quest, although why Marie Antoinette would find the need to personally turn up at the Chevalier’s doorstep like his chill high school bestie was beyond my comprehension.
The fact that this movie is set in France is largely lost despite the glorious wigs of the age quite faithfully reproduced. The movie decides to eliminate French for the most part except for smatterings spoken in the background. It’s quite bizarre how they have substituted for French an elegant variant of English; surely a little more French wouldn’t have hurt this high school musicale en France? Marie-Josephine does sing in French, in dulcet-silver tones. Her portrayal by Samara Weaving is delicate; she is but a caged canary and a “mulatto” like Joseph could hardly set her free when he himself is trapped within the social pretences of class and complexion.
As a historic record, the Chevalier does the job of drawing attention to the great man and his prodigious talent, but the fictional part of this historic fiction has a stronger flavour. And in that light, it is an enjoyable tale, composed of the right elements — a talented man, foiled by racism, his doomed love story, his own reckoning with internalised racism and eventually the decision to use his remarkable skill and pull for the cause of the French Revolution.
Is this fact? A lot of it probably isn’t — there is no record of his love life for one, and by some accounts, his move towards the French Revolution was more gradual than the movie would have you believe.
Further, the attempt to include progressive sentiments is seen, and both appreciated and questioned. For example, would a French noblewoman stand upon a table at a meeting of rebels and question whether egalite would include egalite for women? The movie strains at its eager Parisian pantaloons to talk of egalité for women at a secret revolutionary meeting, but historicity demands it is corseted away neatly into the conventions of the time.
This seems more like wishful thinking, abandoned by the end by the heroine herself who is shown as trapped by her circumstances and not making much of a suffragette fight against it.
The scene which made the movie for me was where Bologne strikingly walks out as violin music swells and the fires of the revolution burn around him. This music is, delightfully, an actual composition by Joseph Bologne himself — Violin Concerto 2 in op 8.
It is heartening that the movie did take the trouble to include compositions by the Chevalier himself. If his oeuvres were forgotten by time, what better way to discover them than through this movie, after all, a quasi-paean to his talent and a quasi-record of his journey?
Chevalier is currently streaming on Disney+ Hotstar
