"Chevalier" begins with a showdown sequence so irresistible it really doesn't matter if it ever actually happened. In a jewel-box Paris theater sometime in the second half of the 18th century, a young violinist (Joseph Prowen) leads an orchestra, practically dancing in his glee at performing. "My name is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart," he shouts, in love with the sound of it. From the audience appears another man (Kelvin Harrison Jr.); handsome, beautifully dressed, Black. He, too, is a violinist, and soon the two men are playing a duet that becomes almost a duel; two virtuosos, strings soaring, the second man quickly proving himself the equal if not the better of the first. The music, wild and glorious and seemingly possessing both men, fills the theater. A woman in the audience fans herself. You might, too.
That second man is Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-99), and the movie is about him, not the far more famous Mozart, whose story has already been told (and who doesn't appear in the film again after the opening). The son of a French plantation owner and an African enslaved woman, Bologne was a brilliant musician and composer, a gifted swordsman and a fashionable figure in Paris' highest social circles during the reign of Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton). Though little remains of his work today (much of it was destroyed during the French Revolution, and performances of his work were banned during Napoleon's era), his story is slowly beginning to be told.
"Chevalier," directed by Stephen Williams from a screenplay by Stefani Robinson, isn't quite a biopic; large stretches of Bologne's life are left unexplored, and you leave the film wanting to know more about this remarkable figure from the past. (One sentence in an end note, about Bologne's participation in the National Guard during the French Revolution, would make a fascinating movie all on its own.) But it's a handsome, stirring and often thrilling film, exploring Bologne's complicated relationship with his mother Nanon (Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo), his love affair with a white woman (Samara Weaving) — "It is illegal for someone of my complexion to marry someone of my class," he notes, with sad resignation — and his dream of becoming head of the Paris Opera. Despite his prominence, he is, as his mother observes, a tourist in French society; he'll always be an outsider.
Beautifully and elaborately designed, the film offers delicious period-piece eye candy (I am, of course, helpless in the wake of a film in which people say things like, "Someone ready my carriage!"), but also brings poignant, moving scenes such as one in which Nanon quietly braids her son's hair, reminding him that, "Choice comes from within ... . There is always a choice to fight." And Harrison, in a star-making performance (continuing the trajectory shown in movies like "Waves," "Cyrano" and "Elvis"), carries the film with ease: playing the violin as if its passionate voice were his own; smoothly wielding a sword; vividly creating a man whose outward smoothness and elegant posture masks a turbulent, creative soul. History almost erased Joseph Bologne; this film lets him live again.
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'CHEVALIER'
3.5 stars (out of 4)
Rated: PG-13 (for thematic content, some strong language, suggestive material and violence)
Running time: 1:47
How to watch: In theaters Friday
