Chevalier

 

Stephen Williams' 2022 biopic of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Chevalier, is a curiously anachronistic telling of the rise, fall and awakening of France's first Black classical composer and violin virtuoso.

When we meet Bologne (played with brio by the always-winning Kelvin Harrison Jr.), it is pre-Revolution Paris, and Bologne challenges a young Mozart to what amounts to a violin duel, leaving the great composer bested and flustered. The scene is well-staged with a patina of modern swagger. It sets the tone for the film.

Bologne was the son of a white Frenchman and an enslaved Black woman in Guadeloupe. He was brought to Paris by his father and enrolled in a prestigious academy where he excelled in fencing and music. His abilities, refutations to white supremacy, won him celebrity and the favor of Marie Antoinette (played by Lucy Boynton), who knights him "chevalier."

During most of the first act, Bologne's race is treated as nearly incidental, but as the story presses on, race moves more and more to center stage.

When his mother (Ronke Adekoluejo) joins him in Paris and the Chevalier begins an affair with a pretty young singer (Samara Weaving) he has cast in an opera, against her racist husband's wishes, the audience knows it is only a matter of time before Bologne realizes color in imperial France is immutable, inescapable, even for the supremely gifted. He faces abandonment by friends, lovers and sponsors and eventually joins the egalite' revolution.

Williams and screenwriter Stefani Robinson have folded into the movie's coda grace notes of Black cultural consciousness -- Bologne begins to wear his hair in cornrows and at one point he joins a drum circle that includes other Black men.

As has become de rigeur in films based on true events, the closing frames include notes about the movie's subjects. Bologne's presence was scrubbed from French culture after Bonaparte reinstituted slavery. He has only recently been rediscovered by historians.