Chevalier
Kelvin Harrison Jr. commands the screen in an avant-garde spectacle of love and identity about the forgotten musical titan, Joseph Bologne.
Like any biopic, Chevalier quickly lays out the upbringing of Bologne starting in Paris and not his birthplace. It speeds through his youth attending a prestigious French boarding school to becoming a Chevalier. Writer Stefani Robinson takes a risk by blending fact and fiction paired with the grandiose direction of Stephen Williams to capture the extravagance of 18th-century France with the delicacy of Bologne’s life. Additionally, It is a visual overload for fans of period pieces from the elaborate costumes, extravagant production pieces, and well-lit cinematography that bring to life one of the most influential periods in world history. A major standout is the phenomenal score and sound design that capture the senses of this missing piece of history.
Chevalier takes place during a well-documented period of history that has been taught to the world through one perspective. At this time the legislation Code Noir made sure slavery was still practiced in French colonies. Harrison is tasked with communicating the tension of occupying an elite space that is unwelcoming to someone like him. He attempts to bring this layer into his riveting, rockstar-like performance but the screenplay is not invested in this exploration. He smoothly braces on for the turbulence of a screenplay that moves between explosive and tame. It has its moments of blatant racism that feel weirdly feel like afterthoughts in the overall story.
The legacy of Joseph Bologne’s musical brilliance has been scrubbed from the records. The film brilliantly opens up with a rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to simply say Bologne was a man who could have taken on the great given the chance. The audience is immediately introduced to his superior talents in this scene questioning why he is not widely known by the general public regarding classical music. While he was bestowed a title of notoriety, it could not save him from being a Black man in a white world. Throughout the film, he is a man striving to push the limits, but once he does so it is not enough. He wants to break through the restrictions placed upon him, but his ambitions lead to his demise. After gaining Marie Antoinette’s allegiance he sets out to become the leader of the Paris Opera.
Chevalier’s script centers around Joseph’s identity as a Black man in French society but often leans into a half-baked romance story with the forbidden Marie-Josephine. The romance between Joseph and Marie-Josephine is full of passion and chemistry in many intimate scenes, but the invented romance amid a historic overview of someone’s life is an interesting choice. Since the film brushes past many aspects of the composer’s life, there isn’t room to watch this romance fully bloom taking it straight from one glance to the bedroom. Their romance becomes a major driver of the plot but takes time away from the nuance and internal conflicts of Bologne’s identity. The romance does add an emotional layer to the film but pushes it into soap opera territory to attract a modern audience’s interest.
Chevalier is not the definitive history of the life of Joseph Bologne but a perfect starting point to discuss his musical contributions and reinstate him into the history books for not only France but classical music. Its final moment reels the story back to its driving point about the power of art during times of cultural change.