Kelvin Harrison Jr. is dashing and hypnotic as the driven, enigmatic musical virtuoso
Chevalier (2023)
Herein lies history, dressed to impress. Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745–1799), was a composer and violinist, a child prodigy who rose to prominence in France as it lurched toward the revolution of 1789.
The illegitimate son of a white planter and an enslaved Senegalese woman, he arrived in France from Guadeloupe as a young boy (played by Reuben Anderson).
When we meet him, as he steps out of an ornate coach, his eyes are curious, already a little beyond innocence, watching this strange country of white people who take him more as a brown objet than a person.
His father, who’s overseen and carefully nurtured the boy’s grasp of violin technique, believes that nothing less will do for his gifted progeny than training at the most elite musical academy in France.
When the boy performs brilliantly at his audition, the astonished head of the academy overcomes his reluctance to introduce a child of color into the ranks of the French musical elite and admits him.
No one can best an intelligent Frenchman. Those are the plantation overlord’s parting words to his son before immediately returning to Guadeloupe.
Alone and friendless, Joseph has only this nostrum to make himself a redoubtable – undeniable – Frenchman.
But white French youth, when they don’t shun him, mock and beat him, cruelly advising him that despite his fine clothes and powdered wigs, the color of his skin will keep him out of proper French society.
I’ll show them, burns from his eyes.
As a grown man, the preening Chevalier (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) basks in the plaudits he earns as a musician and the sexual favors of the enchanted women he beds.
How, though, is he different from any dashing young Parisian on his way up in the world?
Talent, then as now, is never enough. The doggedness he summons against formidable odds is this movie’s raison d’étre, and Joseph’s unlikely rise makes for intriguing drama.
Still, we wonder, has Chevalier’s father set his son free or thrown him to the wolves?
The movie turns on that question without fully coming to grips with the sheer daily terror a Black man, no matter how prodigious his talent, would have had to suppress in the highest reaches of French society.
We wait anxiously to see whether his mastery of the violin and the composer’s craft can ensure his success within a hostile, corrupt class.
On the surface, there seem to be few blocks in his path. His virtuoso violin playing dazzles the French aristocracy.
He begins composing concert pieces and eventually fully staged operas. He audaciously competes to lead the country’s premier musical ornament, the Paris Opera.
Bravo, then, to director Stephen Williams and his collaborators for this vividly rendered act of rediscovery. We meet a man well worth knowing.
As Chevalier, Harrison gets the shifting nuances of this conflicted man’s ardor convincingly right. It’s a silken performance, debonair and bold in just the right mix.
His foppish white opponent for the job sneers. Color is king in France, his malicious eyes seem to warn the confident Chevalier.
The fop is correct. The elite turn on the Black upstart for daring to seek the post of Paris Opera director.
Those who once fawned over him suddenly ridicule him as a “toy” and a “pet monkey” who’s absurdly overstepped.
Denied what he believes he deserves, Joseph redoubles his struggle for respect not just as a musician but as a man.
The sumptuous costumes and opulent salons, bed chambers and drawing rooms make for a grand spectacle, but the elements of Chevalier’s rise and fall from favor aren’t quite as amply detailed.
Fortunately, we’re still drawn into Joseph’s striving because of Stefani Robinson’s adroit script. She smartly calls on three women to give us an un-bedazzled look at this suave, prancing arriviste.
Queen Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton) adopts Joseph as a court favorite. He becomes a social magnet, exotic, hot, smoothly self-assured.
With her support, he can wave off the condescension of the decadent, collapsing French aristocracy. But for how long?
The married Marie-Josephine (Samara Weaving), a gifted opera diva, not only collaborates with Joseph on the grand opera that will secure his reputation, but she also becomes his lover.
It’s a provocative turn, but I wish we saw more of the scheming a mixed-race romance in the 18th century surely would have demanded.
Chevalier adopts cornrows under the hands of his worried mother Nanon (Ronke Adekoluejo)
Finally, we wonder how Chevalier relates to other Blacks in France, including those from his native Guadeloupe. We get our answer with the arrival of his mother Nanon (Ronke Adekoluejo).
His father has died, and she re-enters her son’s life deeply skeptical about how they both will fare among a careless, hedonistic white elite.
Adekoluejo gives a sly, blistering performance as she guides her son back to his roots.
It takes us a while to realize how, under her suasion, he slowly regains comfort in his own skin and, as a sign, abandons tight powdered wigs for neat cornrows.
Still, what’s gone before, his consummate ease as an obvious outsider, lands a bit oddly.
The France where his rise took place is underdeveloped. The garish, appalling opulence of Louis XVI’s court isn’t held up to scorn.
We’re told of French poor begging for food and sleeping in the streets, but we barely get a glimpse of them.
Chevalier stages a concert and packs the house in support of revolutionary forces whose fervor will eventually topple the Ancien Régime.
But the crowd’s cries of Égalité! haven’t been adequately explained. Only our reading of history tells us where their demands for justice are coming from.
Did Chevalier “conquer” French society only to, in his later years, rebel against it?
That sounds too neat, but the historical record suggests that’s roughly what happened.
And his reputation suffered. For more than a century music scholars paid scant attention to his achievements.
Bravo, then, to director Stephen Williams and his collaborators for this vividly rendered act of rediscovery. We meet a man well worth knowing.
As Chevalier, Harrison gets the shifting nuances of this conflicted man’s ardor convincingly right. It’s a silken performance, debonair and bold in just the right mix.
Are Joseph’s astonishing grit and bedeviling charm fully realized here?
Not in quite as much depth as we need. The man must have been even steelier and shrewder than we’re shown.
But for any storyteller, depicting historical truth is always a risk.
The bold upstart Chevalier locked in fervent onstage battle with Mozart (Joseph Prowen)
And these moviemakers, to their credit, open – and pull us in – with a grand coup de théâtre. Whether it’s historically accurate, I don’t know.
In the movie’s first scene, onstage before a frenzied crowd, a contest of musical giants is suddenly on.
The highly skilled but still not widely known Chevalier challenges that prince of musical prodigies, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, to a violin duel.
Is there a true victor? You’ll have to see the movie to find out.