CIFF: “Chevalier” - Film Review
Chevalier’s opening scene is like a lightning strike. Mozart (Joseph Prowen) is leading a performance of his latest work when a voice from the audience asks if he can play along with Mozart. Initially, the young man isn’t taken seriously by Mozart because he is Black, but as soon as he picks up a violin, everyone’s tune changes. It’s perhaps the only instance in the history of film where a character playing a violin actually comes across as cool. That character? Joseph Bologne aka Chevalier de Saint-Georges (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). If that name doesn’t sound familiar to you, you’re not alone. Chevalier seeks to bring forward the story of a man forgotten by history. Joseph was a French Creole violin prodigy and composer who rose to popularity in the late 18th-century, despite the racism he endured as a Black man.
Because of his status as chevalier, Joseph runs in high-society circles. He regularly performs private concerts for Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton) and has a tumultuous love affair with Marquise Marie-Josephine de Montalembert (Samara Weaving), the young wife of a high-ranking military officer (Marton Csokas). Joseph’s dream is to become the director of the Paris Opera, but he learns that someone else is also after that position. Marie Antoinette proposes a competition: the two men will each write an opera and the winner will be crowned director of the Paris Opera.
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Even though, as the pre-credits text explains, there is much information about Joseph’s life that is missing, even a cursory scroll through his Wikipedia page provides more facts than the film does. Given the title of the film, it makes sense that the script focuses more on the time he was a chevalier and his friendship with Marie Antoinette rather than his later years in the French Revolution. Instead of a well-rounded look at Joseph’s life, Chevalier focuses most of its attention on his tumultuous love affair with Marie-Josephine. Chevalier would not be the first period piece to focus more on passion than on facts, but what causes this film to miss the mark is that its love story is not compelling. Harrison Jr. and Weaving desperately stare at each other, praying for a spark to ignite, but their chemistry is barely a fizzle. Sidelining the true story of an unknown Black virtuoso in favor of a love story hurts all the more when that romance has no passion.
When making a biopic, there’s always the question of how closely the film should remain true to history. Is the point of this genre to educate or to entertain? Is there a way for it to do both? Is there a burden on the filmmaker to stay close to the truth because asking the audience to do their own research is outside the social contract of making movies? Those questions are just the surface of what it means to base a film on the life of a real person. Especially when that real person is largely unknown to the general population. If someone made a film where Abraham Lincoln was blonde, people would know to take the rest of the film with a grain of salt. However, with Chevalier, how are audiences to know that the entire subplot involving Joseph’s mother (Ronke Adekoluejo) is fictitious? Perhaps the fact that all the actors have British accents, despite the fact that they’re portraying French characters, should make it obvious from the start that fact isn’t guiding the film.
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Ultimately, Chevalier lets down the actual man and the actors involved. Weaving and Harrison Jr. are two of the most exciting actors in young Hollywood, but their charm is lost in the trappings of a paint-by-numbers biopic. The same goes for Joseph Bologne himself. He was a violin virtuoso, a fencing prodigy, a chevalier, a composer, a playboy, a revolutionary, and the leader of the first all-Black regiment in Europe, yet this portrayal of him doesn’t inspire any desire to further investigate his life. The central plot of the head-to-head opera challenge was created for the sake of the film, but it pales in comparison to Joseph’s actual story. For all of Chevalier’s possibilities, the end result cannot hold a candle to the man behind the violin.
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