Chevalier (2023)

Score: 4 / 5

It's been a long time since I've seen a biopic this enchanting and thrilling, even a costume drama, and one about music to boot! Admittedly, it also taught me about a historical person I never knew about, which is arguably also the point of the film, making it that much more of a success unto itself. Chevalier is the rare perfect blend of style and substance, a shocking and timely story told through rapturous production design and seamless filmmaking technique. They pop up every now and again -- most recently, I'm thinking of one of a number of Jane Austen adaptations like Persuasion and Emma., and then Lady Chatterley's Lover -- but they've fallen a bit out of fashion, especially any not adapted from classics.

In 18th Century France, with Queen Marie Antoinette on the throne, a young man named Joseph Bologne works his way up the social ladder. He's an accomplished fencer, proficient violinist, and popular composer. In public, he's charming and charismatic, so much so that becomes an intimate friend of many in high society, including the queen herself. He's keenly aware of his ravishing good looks, considerable talents, and widespread adoration. Bologne is also of mixed race, the son of a plantation owner and his slave, and no amount of friendship with royalty will spare him from the racist and classist elites in Paris. Not with revolution on the horizon.

It's a fascinating story, one I won't recount here except to say his rise and fall feels less like a traditional tragic or comic arc and more as though Bologne was a lynchpin of sociopolitical anxieties during a turbulent period in French -- and world -- history. The filmmakers here, specifically director Stephen Williams and writer Stefani Robinson, seem to feel a sense of pride and urgency in sharing Bologne's story, which as ending text reveals, has been mostly lost to time since Napoleon's regime blacklisted (pardon the word choice) Bologne's name and music. The costumes and production design are beautiful, rapturously transporting us to the period in both its glamorous and decadent aspects. While the inclusion of the simmering French Revolution is arguably the film's weakest element -- shoehorned in after lots of steamy romance, emotional family drama, socioeconomic anxiety, and of course music -- the film makes a strong case for relating Bologne to major cultural and historical shifts and indeed reclaiming his role in the conflict in real life.

Educational in the best way, Chevalier is also intensely entertaining. Apart from the filmmakers' modern sensibility in terms of editing and dialogue (the film opens with a sort of violin duel in concert that, while somewhat fantastic, is certainly arresting), there is also the immensely intriguing title character. Bologne is charismatic and knows his attractiveness; he's also deeply conflicted and loaded with larger-than-life concerns, from being as excellent as his father charged him to be to relearning about his emotional roots when his newly freed mother (Ronke Adekoluejo) arrives. Kelvin Harrison Jr. plays the Chevalier (or "knight") de Saint-Georges with a grounded cockiness, an earned wisdom of the world that is nevertheless somewhat sardonic and even angry. One of my favorite moments for him, though, is in the quiet when he removes his wig and his mother cornrows his hair. He also has some fun -- read: hot -- chemistry with the queen (Lucy Boynton) and his sometime paramour, the white and married opera singer Marie-Josephine (Samara Weaving), whose anti-artistic husband (Marton Csokas) is utterly chilling on screen. But it's when things get really deadly during the final act that this movie lurches into something much more powerful than a costume drama about musicians vying for fame and favor. It's about them dying for freedom, and familiar as the narrative structure may be, you're not ready for its emotional assault.