‘Chevalier’ movie review: A charming Kelvin Harrison Jr. leads a wavering story on Chevalier de Saint-Georges

Stephen Williams’ enjoyable retelling of the story of Joseph Balogne is a quasi-paean to the Chevalier’s talent and a quasi-record of his journey, strangely written with wistful thinking and modern storytelling tropes

Stephen Williams’ American biographical period drama Chevalier tells the story of Joseph Bologne, the titular Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a magnificent violinist, and a biracial maestro in a France not yet accepting of the ‘mulatto.’ It follows Bologne (Kelvin Harrison Jr) as he acquires repute and fame for his musical prowess, gains and then loses the favour of Marie-Antoinette (Lucy Boynton), the Queen of France, and battles for the director’s position for the Paris Opera, which is eventually unready to listen to a Black man. Interwoven with this is a bittersweet but clearly ill-fated love with Marie-Josephine (Samara Weaving), the married Marquise of Montalembert, and the beginnings of the French Revolution that was to send up the French monarchy in flames.

The setting of the period drama, as behoves one of its nature, is lush and the costuming is gorgeous. The filming has decidedly not strayed from France, perhaps to Europe at the very most. This serves the movie well, centring it in space and time from the get-go with recognisable visual elements.

Here, however, the periodicity of the period drama ends when the screenplay takes its own tour through modern tropes of storytelling. At times, the movie seems like an odd pastiche of period drama and a tale of musical competition that could verily be set in a high school or college. Is Marie Antoinette the Queen of France or the undependable but highly decorative head of the theatre club?

The dialogues are immaturely composed and the narrative weaves through a familiar landscape for recent anti-racist films — a surprise since it is decidedly supposed to be a good century or two behind the times. But despite this, to much surprise, the movie is thoroughly enjoyable, especially as the pace picks up towards the end like an ascending crash of violins.

It’s also perhaps the highly charming and likeable lead actor whose character evolution is shown quite decently although he doesn’t collect much audience sympathy until halfway through the film. The slights and the racism directed at him are depicted with no subtlety.

Again, some of these barbs are more modern than contemporary to his time. For example, La Guimard chides him saying “Go back to where you came from.” This is a typical anti-immigrant barb in the United States of today. Especially painful are the insults calling him a monkey and a party trick, but this is undercut by the dramatic nature of the showdown. Further, Bologne blames his mother for abandoning him, as if she were not a slave on a plantation in Guadeloupe with hardly any agency of her own.

There is a slight Bridgerton-esque liberty with the period aspect of the period drama, a venture also attempted in 2023’s Persuasion, to my great personal chagrin.