Chevalier

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.

On the other hand one can make arguments that the elisions or additions make more sense dramatically, and work to give us a deeper understanding of this man’s character, and the time and place in which he came up to prominence, before diving down again and dying in obscure penury, even if they depict things that never really happened in these ways.

At the very least we can say we get some sense of the man. Joseph (played with some degree of difficulty by Kelvin Harrison Jnr as an adult) is the product of a French aristocrat raping one of his slaves at his plantation on the Caribbean island of Guadalupe. As an illegitimate son, Joseph has no right to anything, especially as someone who’s black, under French law and in French society. He’s not even considered fully human.

His father doesn’t want him around, so he delivers him to a prestigious music academy in Paris, where he is told that his only recourse in order to survive will be that he has to excel so much, be so much better at everything than anyone else that no-one will be able to gainsay him or tell him he doesn’t belong.

They still tell him constantly that he doesn’t belong, because of his skin colour, but he becomes the greatest at everything that matters to them, whether it’s playing music, composing music, or even fencing. Being great at fencing means anyone who gives him shit could presumably get a sword to the guts and then shut the fuck up forever.

When he wins a fencing contest against some jerk, after we’re subjected to, as he is, some stupid speech proclaiming white supremacy, Marie Antoinette herself is so impressed she bestows the title of chevalier upon him, making him a knight, effectively giving him some cover against the noble snakes and vipers that surround him.

He composes great music and everyone loves that, and him (he is shown bedding “white” and “black” women two at a time), but because he turns down an opera diva (Minnie Driver), he is marked for destruction.

All the while the good chevalier swans around Paris with an earned level of arrogance.
He was told he would have to be the best, so he became the best at an array of disciplines, so he feels he’s earned his (tenuous) place in Parisian high society.

But the rest of them don’t agree. Being the “best” can be ignored whenever the good racists of the salons and the court decide they no longer have to play along. Even Marie Antoinette eventually decides she risks her own standing if she’s seen to support the chevalier over some other guy who wants to be the head of the Paris Opera.

After a very racist petition is circulated, ‘forcing’ the good queen to appoint someone else in his place, the chevalier loses it, and goes on a drunken rampage.

Nothing good comes from drunken rampages.

After his father’s death, his mother Nanon (Ronke Adekoluejo) comes to live with him, and Joseph is all like “don’t be so black, don’t speak Creole, don’t remind me of times when I was young”. He is cold to her, and in fact he’s pretty cold to everyone in the flick. Who can really blame him? As French society starts to reject him, and he stops rejecting his mother and his past, I wonder if this will make him a better person?

He is in an impossible position. This is an incredible time to be alive. The French thinkers of the Enlightenment who are arguing about what people’s rights should be, must be, don’t include him or people from his background in their so called “universal declarations of human rights”. He has someone he loves, who is married, Marie Josephine (Samara Weaving), and she too wonders aloud at the meetings the revolutionaries are having (as the lead up to when they cut all those tens of thousands of heads off). Marie Josephine questions where she and her cursed kind (women) fit in to the Rights of Man arguments. What’s in it for them, if their status remains the same, with the same level of autonomy or agency?

Lip service to her concerns is barely paid. The barest amount of lip service is paid even by those close to Joseph in terms of understanding how fraught his position is, how injustice keeps getting piled on injustice, how little the awfulness of white supremacy needs in terms of having to justify itself, because it’s just taken as given, as the law of the land by those who benefit from it.

A lot of other melodramatic stuff is depicted in this flick, stuff delivered pretty indifferently, that also didn’t feel like it really happened. And from a shaky foundation it tries to build up to some strange climax, where the chevalier wants to stage concerts to raise money for the revolutionaries, and Marie Antoinette tells him if he does so, she’ll fuck him up.

I wonder if he’s going to go through with it anyway, playing a melody his mother sang to him, that he initially rejected, and has now embraced?

I am not pretending that I knew anything about this man’s incredible life before this film came along, but even just reading through the Wikipedia page for this man, I can see that his life was far more eventful, far more interesting than what they settled on here as being worthy of our notice.

One criticism I’ve read of the film is that the flick spends so much time on the arseholes who try to oppress our hero that it doesn’t devote sufficient time to the things that he did that really mattered. He only exists in relation to the people who wish he didn’t exist. I really don’t know if that’s a fair criticism, because the shitheads arrayed against the good chevalier are thinner than cardboard anyway. Their opposition is basic prejudice, with no thought behind it. They’re just racist, and they don’t think they have to justify themselves, so there are no arguments to be made about anything.

There’s no doubt that it looks fine, it works fine as a production, the music is great, most of the performance are solid-ish. It just feels a bit thin, overall. The man doesn’t get to live and breath as a real and amazing person who battled adversity and triumphed over bad people – he’s just a guy who had to learn to be himself and accept himself as he is, which is, as an overall moral, fairly shallow.

I mean, this guy fought in wars! He was friends with many of the people he's depicted as being enemies with. He was great friends with the guy who wrote Les Liasions Dangereuses, from which we got the gift that keeps on giving, Dangerous Liaisons! It was the revolutionaries who jailed him, not the royalists! He led an army of free people of the Americas! He did all sorts of things! And yet...

6 times I sometimes get drunk and yell at the Queen as well out of 10

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“The greatest evil is convincing us that we have no choice. But choice cannot be taken away; choice comes from within. And there is always the choice to fight.” - Chevalier