Chevalier
I'm looking at my shoe, I'm looking at my shoe...
dir: Stephen Williams
2022
Chevalier is a remarkable story about someone ill-served by history (and this film) who nonetheless seems like he was a pretty accomplished guy. The France that the movie is mostly set in is the France of just before the revolution. Marie Antoinette is Queen. Louis XVI is King. They are just begging to have their heads cut off.
France is one of the pre-eminent colonial powers on the planet. Slavery is its great source of wealth. The peoples of the colonies are considered sub-human. Someone who's found his way from the colonies to mainland France is, at this time in history, up to and including the present, going to find it hard to be accepted for who they are beyond their skin colour.
Make no mistake – the France depicted here is the kind of France you’d expect depicted (by non-French people) as in, so deeply and openly racist you’d think this was set in the antebellum South. One of the many points the flick is making is that whatever pretensions France had of being a beacon to the world of culture and refinement, even as it’s on the precipice of a revolution that would eventually reorder all of Europe, it’s a deeply racist place. They will literally have scene after scene of people telling the protagonist that he is seen as subhuman regardless of and in spite of his brilliance and accomplishments.
The film opens (somewhat unfortunately) with a strange scene where a young Mozart is playing to rapturous acclaim in front of a Parisian audience with an orchestra. He asks the audience if they have requests. The audience start yelling out their favourites. A piece is decided upon, something like “Cantata in E major, third movement”, they start playing it, the interloper borrows a violin and competes against Mozart himself, and everyone is just blown away by how much better this other blow-in is.
“Who the fuck is that guy?” yells a chastened Mozart, just in time for the title.
In the list of things that never happened, this never happened the most.
This is a true story, as in the chap that this is all about actually existed, but so many things depicted in this flick never happened, or are unlikely to have happened. One could argue that, considering the racist hostility that existed around and against him and people like him, efforts were made to erase Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de St George from history, so that the scant record for many of these occasions was deliberate.
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