107 min | PG-13 | April 21, 2023 | Searchlight Pictures
Joseph Bologne is a virtuoso violinist, a champion fencer, and the son of an enslaved woman in pre-revolutionary France. He charms a king and feuds with Mozart while the court that celebrates him refuses to see him as fully human. The man is extraordinary. The movie about him plays it safe.
Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, rises to the heights of French society on talent the aristocracy cannot ignore. He fences. He composes. He plays the violin well enough to challenge Mozart in public and win. The film tracks his ascent and his collision with the limits a racist court places on a Black man it pretends to embrace. Underneath the period gloss sits a sharper story about a man building an identity inside a culture that grants him celebrity but denies him a self.
Kelvin Harrison Jr. carries the film with a performance built on contained tension. He plays Bologne as a man who has learned to weaponize charm and watches the cost of that performance register behind his eyes. The violin work looks credible, and Harrison sells the arrogance of a prodigy who knows exactly how good he is. Samara Weaving plays Marie-Josephine as a trapped wife whose talent the marriage smothers. Lucy Boynton plays Marie Antoinette with a friendliness that curdles into self-interest the moment Bologne becomes inconvenient. Marton Csokas plays the Marquis de Montalembert as plain menace, and the part gives him nowhere interesting to go.
Stephen Williams directs from a script by Stefani Robinson, and the filmmaking favors handsome surfaces over risk. The production design renders Versailles and the Paris concert halls in saturated color and gilded detail. The musical sequences are the film at its strongest, and the camera stays close on Harrison’s hands and face during the performances to fuse the man to his instrument. Robinson’s script moves through the biography in clean, legible beats. It hits the marks of the rise-and-fall structure without disrupting them.
Chevalier rescues a genuinely forgotten figure from history and gives him a movie that looks the part. The problem is that the conventional biopic shape flattens a life that deserves stranger treatment. Bologne’s story is about the violence of conditional acceptance, and the film states that theme more often than it dramatizes it. Harrison gives the material more complication than the script around him earns. The result entertains and instructs without ever cutting as deep as its subject demands.