Kelvin Harrison Jr., left, and Joseph Prowen in Chevalier (Larry Horricks/Searchlight Pictures)

The prodigious musical output of the composer and violin virtuoso Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, has been ripe for rediscovery for centuries since his work was banned by Napoleon in the early 1800s. His music has been heard of late on classical radio stations, and he has been recently profiled by music journalists (Opera News), and now the biopic Chevalier, directed by Stephen Williams, may take his fame to the next level. On that account, the period piece succeeds. Though in depicting his fascinating life story that has the historical sweep of a thick page-turner, the results are less in harmony.  

Born in 1745, Bologne was the son of a White plantation owner and an enslaved Senegalese woman in the French colony of Guadeloupe. Remarkably for that time, his father, George Bologne (Jim High), sent him off to boarding school in France, having recognized his illegitimate son as a musical prodigy. When they are about to part, the father tells his seven-year-old son, “you must be excellent, always excellent. No one can tear down an excellent Frenchman,” instilling less an encouragement and more of a warning. The headmaster has already cautioned that his Black son won’t be accepted by schoolmates.

 
Fortunately, the filmmakers haven’t forgotten the reason for Bologne’s high-profile, late 18th–century career, his music, unlike other films that center on artists that completely ignore their art (Babylon). The film starts off with the adult Bologne storming a stage and engaging in a duel of violins, a battle of bragging rights between Joseph (a regal though restrained Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and the braggard Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Joseph Prowen), who is as smug and brash here as he was in Amadeus, although now he’s a racist, incredulous that a Black man can be cultured, let alone play music. In this musical showdown, both actors take joy in playing and winning over the audience to their side through their dexterity with a bow and strings. (Harrison performs his own finger work.) 

At its best, the filmmakers re-create the jockeying of positions in pre-Revolution Paris. Rather than shying away from classical music, the movie emphasizes the musical stylings of the era. It also brings backstabbing at the opera to the forefront with a duplicitous, devious diva, the fictitious La Guimard (Minnie Driver), based on the ballerina Marie-Madeleine Guimard. Opera nearly turns into a blood sport through a contest: Whoever composes the best opera will lead the company. So, it’s Bologne vs. Christoph Willibald Gluck (Henry Lloyd-Hughes). Bologne assumes he has victory within his sights since he has become a favorite of Queen Marie Antoinette, played by a wide-eyed Lucy Boynton. (A sequence of auditioning sopranos butchering one of his arias rivals American Idol’s most cringeworthy moments.) 
 

However, when the film’s focus shifts from the stage and to the turbulent turn of events of his life, it succumbs to soap opera antics as Bologne falls in love with his prima donna, Marie-Josephine de Comarieu (Samara Weaving), in his opera Ernestine. An aristocrat, she has disobeyed her stogy husband, the virulently racist Marquis de Montalembert (a villain born to be booed by the audience, played by Marton Csokas) for a life on the stage. The decrescendo of their clandestine relationship and Bologne’s career are covered by bullet points more so than through emotion. A bottle of red wine smashing against a wall has as much impact as any of the on-screen histrionics. Rather than gradually build tension, the screenplay wedges in confrontations—it’s doubtful that Bologne would ever think of confronting and humiliating Maria Antoinette in front of her court.

In terms of historical accuracy, it is true that prominent divas did protest, and thus block, his appointment to the Paris Opera because of his race. However, one historical figure gets the short end of the stick: Gluck, portrayed as a milquetoast hack and his opera, Orfeo, as hackneyed. That is far from the truth. Gluck, a groundbreaking composer, radically changed the art form, and his compact, 90-minute Orfeo ed Euridice is a strong introduction for anyone curious about the genre. Bologne’s operas have largely been lost, though The Anonymous Lover, his one surviving operatic work, was performed by Los Angeles Opera and the Colburn School to a streaming audience in 2020—and is available on CD/digital downloads, along with his concertos, symphonies, sonatas, and quartets, not to mention the film’s soundtrack.