Period drama’s narrow focus on telling and re-telling the same stories has, historically at least, deprived audiences of some rip-roaring screen fare. That’s now changing, as evidenced by this film about 18th-century Parisian polymath Joseph Bologne AKA Chevalier de Saint-Georges. As played by Kelvin Harrison Jr, this fascinating fellow escaped a Caribbean slave plantation – his mother was a Senegalese-African woman; his father her enslaver – to reach the highest echelons of French society. There he excelled as a champion fencer, composer and virtuoso violinist, described by US founding father John Adams as “the most accomplished man in Europe”.
Screenwriter Stefani Robinson and director Stephen Williams have now brought his story to the screen, beginning with an impressive scene in which Bologne upstages Mozart at his own concert by challenging him to a musical duel: F Murray Abraham’s Salieri would have loved to see it! Their weapon is the violin, but the most essential element in Bologne’s armoury – and perhaps that of any Black artist – is his unassailable self-confidence. That genuine talent is the basis for this, and it is also persuasively demonstrated in the on-camera arrangements by Michael Abels, which incorporate Bologne’s own concertos with some interesting speculation on the musical influence of his Afro-Caribbean heritage.
