Film review: Chevalier – InDaily

You might not have heard of the 18^th-century French composer, conductor and violinist Joseph Bologne, a knight of the French court docket, which is completely the purpose. He was a recent of Mozart and in some methods his equal, however there was an issue: he was half Creole and his pores and skin color consigned him to obscurity alongside together with his music.

“Nobody can tear down a wonderful Frenchman,” the daddy tells the boy who’s dropped off at boarding faculty in Paris after being torn from the arms of his distraught mom, a Senegalese slave on a Guadeloupe plantation.

The teenager follows his recommendation and excels in most issues however significantly the violin, and the movie opens with Mozart giddily skipping round on stage in a French live performance corridor earlier than Bologne (Kelvin Harrison Jr, who was BB King in Elvis) throws down the problem. Duelling violins it’s, and Bologne wins, earlier than shaming new opponents in a swordfight.

He’s so charming and completed that his buddy, Queen Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton), bestows on him the title of Chevalier de Saint-Georges, an incredible privilege.

After all, one thing should go fallacious as a result of this a lot peacocking can by no means go unpunished.

The timing is the eve of the French Revolution and the peasants are agitating for liberté, egalité, fraternité. Chevalier falls foul of the more and more nervous court docket, ostensibly as a result of he rejected an older aristocrat, Marie-Madeleine (Minnie Driver). His try and beat the German composer Christoph Gluck to move the Paris Opera is a disastrous overreach, and he tempts the fates additional by means of a dalliance with opera singer Marie-Josephine (Australia’s Samantha Weaving), a marquise married to a tyrant.

By now it feels as if we’re settling in for a Bridgerton spin-off with an artless melodrama by which Chevalier is simply one other case of blind casting. However the worm turns: rejected by the aristocracy, he finds the revolutionary concepts begin making extra sense, and he embraces the music by his Wolof-speaking mom, who has joined him in Paris.

Author Stefani Robinson (Atlanta) and director Stephen Williams (Watchmen) convey a made-for-TV sequential flatness to a narrative that deserves extra complexity and nuance. It has not one of the eccentric coloratura of The Favorite (2018) or The Nice (2020), however invests closely in wigs and theatres, and a love story missing in chemistry.

The early phases of the French Revolution, a blood-drenched decade of social upheaval that modified European historical past, is depicted as a small rabble jostling the marquis who holds a gun he by some means fails to fireside. Whereas the actual Bologne turned on Marie Antoinette and led an all-Black regiment who fought to take down the monarchy, Bologne’s actual story is right here solely signposted, by no means explored.

Chevalier is in theatres now.

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