Kelvin Harrison Jr as Chevalier de Saint-Georges in Chevalier (2022) © Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
Chevalier opens with a scene familiar from innumerable powdered-wig period pieces set in Ancien Régime France: a theatre stuffed with gentry waving opera glasses and watching each other watch a soporific recital by some bore called Mozart. But then our hero, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, crashes the stage to challenge Mozart to a violin battle, and sends the crowd wild. If lighter fluid had existed at the time, director Stephen Williams (Westworld, 2016-2022; the TV version of Watchmen, 2019) would surely have the chevalier douse his violin with it and set it alight on stage.
Saint-Georges is a historical figure: a virtuoso violinist, accomplished composer and champion fencer whose achievements are all the more remarkable for the obstacles he faced as the son of a white father and Black mother. Chevalier sets out to build a biopic that gives him his due and, like Amma Asante’s Belle (2013), shed light on the racial politics that film depictions of the era rarely address.
Unfortunately, despite the extraordinary details of the chevalier’s life – and beyond splashy set pieces like its opening scene – Chevalier struggles to find a story. Instead, Williams and screenwriter Stefani Robinson (Atlanta, 2016-) create formulaic moments of jeopardy, as Saint-Georges competes for a prestigious musical post, involves himself in a scandalous aristocratic love triangle and reconnects with his maternal culture – before the French Revolution breaks out in lieu of an actual plot resolution.
Kelvin Harrison Jr gives Saint-Georges real swagger, and at times a playful bitchiness that suggests he’s deliberately channelling Prince as a spiritual heir. A subplot reuniting Saint-Georges with his Senegalese mother works surprisingly well, giving Saint-Georges a convincing awkwardness once the initial emotional rush of reunion wears off – feeling shame at his mother’s lowly origins, and guilt about that shame.
But the dialogue is crammed with period clichés, the characters trapped in the two-dimensional. It was a mistake to throw Mozart under the bus for Saint-Georges’s big entrance, thereby inviting comparison with Milos Forman’s Amadeus (1984), and its script by Peter Shaffer. Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule (1996) both depicted a society in which conversation could be poisonously subtle and as dangerous as duelling. Here, the cast is left to sneer lines like “You’re playing a dangerous game, chevalier!” or “You’ll regret discarding me, milady!” – with fully audible exclamation marks.