Chevalier

Joseph Bologne (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) was born in Guadeloupe to a white plantation owner and his black slave. He is given an education in France despite racism towards his status. He becomes a great composer and violinist teaching the ladies of high society. He has an affair with the married Marie-Josephine (Samara Weaving). He impresses Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton) and is knighted Chevalier de Saint-Georges. With revolution brewing, a weakened Antoinette denies him the directorship of the Paris Opera due to popular racist sentiment.

I didn't know this fascinating historical figure. This biopic is competent for the most part. I really don't like the Mozart opening. It's just name dropping. In a way, that's what Joseph is doing at that moment challenging Mozart in public. It would be a great opening if Mozart is an important figure in his life. Instead, it's an one-and-done. I kept waiting for his rivalry with Mozart to begin. It takes some of the steam out of the story. Otherwise, this is all about the lead, racism, and the unknown historical figure. It's generally pretty good.

I looked forward to seeing this VERY MUCH, but when it was over ........ I wondered exactly what I had seen - story-wise. It felt empty.

Seems that I don't know much more about Joseph Bologne (Chevalier) than I did prior to watching this. And I feel cheated - because here is an historical character that has to have one hella story! And not just what I saw in a couple of hours however beautifully shot it was. :(

You had bad guy (he's ALWAYS the bad guy) Marton Csokas as Marquis De Montalembert. Say that fast three times and you have your 600 characters. I like Marton Csokas, but it seems to me that he tries to be Ray Stevenson who played Titus Pullo in Rome - someone we loved. He's the same bad guy all the time, just in different clothing. Literally.

Minnie Driver was BRILLIANT as the bad guy female. What a treat!

But this wasn't about Minnie Driver.

And I still do NOT know what Chevalier was really all about.

I felt cheated. There was so much more to this man and his story - and this movie didn't give me even a hint of it!!

Am in hopes someone makes a mini-series about him! Two hours is not long enough!

I don't quite understand the furious negativity about this film - as I thought it was highly watchable. I am a classical music lover, and I've known - and hugely enjoyed - the music of St Georges almost from when first recordings were released. He was certainly one of the most remarkable men of his time - supremely gifted: a brilliant violinist, composer, and swordsman (as indeed shown in the film); and known in France as "Le Mozart Noir" - the black Mozart.

The film certainly takes liberties with the facts (insofar as they are known), and the director admits that the opening musical duel between Mozart and St Georges never happened: this idea was based on the similar musical duel between Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. But so what? It makes for good cinema.

So you can't really call the film a biopic; it's more of an historical fantasy based around St Georges and the tumultuous times of pre-revolutionary France. His music gets a bit of air-play, as it should, but in fact not much really, and I found I didn't mind. I was quite happy simply to be swept along by it.

And it is really very well staged: the costuming, the scenery (both inside and out) are nicely done - I don't know how historically true they are, but for me that doesn't matter. And I thought that Kelvin Harrison Jr was quite fantastic, bringing a gravitas and a passion to his role as the Chevalier.

Weak points were his co-stars: Lucy Boynton as Marie-Antoinette seemed petty and a real light-weight, far from the imperiousness one would expect from the Queen of France. She also seems to wander about quite a bit, especially given the grumblings from the revolutionary mob. The scene in which she appears in St George's lodgings to put him down, she sounds more like an aggrieved shopper being given the wrong change. Samara Weaving is pretty enough, but seems to have no depth of character. Her husband the Marquis de Montalembert is played by Marton Csokas, who acts more like a small-time crook or stand-over merchant than a real menace.

There are times - and possibly too many of them - where the film dragged and seemed to lose its direction and focus. It could do with more rigorous editing and lose 10 or 15 minutes to tighten it up.

For all of those reasons I was going to give it 6/10, but my partner - a much more fierce and demanding critic than me - thought the film was terrific and worth 8/10. So I'm compromising with 7!

When I first saw the commercial, I was intrigued to watch this movie. One of my friend won a preview today at 7:30p, which was pretty packed with folks. The movie is quite good, made me teary and there were moments which really made one admire how it must have been for a talented young man who lived during such difficult times. Though I am glad I managed a sneak preview, I would definitely suggest buying a ticket, sitting back and listening to the lovely music played. While I do enjoy some classical music, learning of Joseph's life and his musical talent needs to have more focus on it and hopefully this movie can help bring that to light.

Apparently, one of the (main?) drivers of the French Revolution was racial equity. Who knew? This is a new Hollywood trend: you transpose current (broadly accepted) societal views into different geographies, cultures and historical periods, basically to prove that they always were eternal. Women Talking, The Woman King are two recent examples of this trend. Art has always been used to convey the ideas of its time, and there's really nothing wrong with it. Except when you pretend that what you're depicting is historically accurate, in which case it becomes revisionism or cultural imperialism. As a violinist and a person who lived in Paris for four years, the cultural imperialism in this film may upset me a bit more than most. But I could actually go with it if the movie were good. But it's not.

The story is actually amazing. Imagine: a black violinist and composer in 18th century France. A man of color who was a contender to become head of the Paris Opera under Louis XVI, and who then became a leader in the French Revolution. One can only dream of what this film could have been in the hands of Spike Lee, Jordan Peele or even better Ladj Ly. It could (should) have been an exploration of the character, his motivations, what it was like to be a person of color in the court of Louis XVI, how he truly embraced revolutionary values and how they reflected on his own condition. What do we get instead from Stephen Williams? An attempt to remake Amadeus with a black character. The plagiarism is so overt that many times you feel as if you were watching segments of Amadeus again, with a few dashes of Kubrick's Barry Lindon here and there. Except that Williams is no Milos Forman and no Stanley Kubrick. His film, weighed down by its narrow program of easy answers we all knew before going into the theatre, is dull and empty, and the characters, without the freedom to exist in their own right, increasingly feel like figures at a wax museum.

One can only hope that a real filmmaker will retake this story and turn it into the film of relevance that it should be.