Review of Chevalier
I penned the bulk of this review on the back of conversations with friends when we watched the film after it came to Hulu in the summer of 2023. But I sat on it, convinced that no one in the broader public had seen Chevalier — or ever would. Despite every three out of four viewers rating it favorably, the film made no impact at the box office, garnered no awards season recognition, and vanished from discussion almost instantly. It doesn’t even make it to the annual “Black Movies for Black History Month” lists that top the banner of every streaming service. Convinced that my review, like the film itself, would reach too niche of an audience, I consigned it to becoming a snack for mice. However, after a re-watch, I have decided Chevalier is too miraculous to go unremarked upon, especially as we approach the five-year anniversary of the Black Lives Matter 2.0 summer (2020–2025).
Chevalier tells a story of Joseph Bologne (1745-1799), the Chevalier de Saint-Georges — sometimes referred to as the “Black Mozart” — an eighteenth-century figure largely omitted from popular history. Born in Guadeloupe to a plantation-owning father and enslaved mother, Bologne was taken to France as a child to receive an education, where he earned the aristocratic title “chevalier” for his merits as a composer, virtuoso violinist, and fencer. The film follows his rise to prominence in high society, his passionate and scandalous love affair, his fall from grace, and his transformation from a celebrated courtier into a revolutionary spirit. There is no doubt that “canon expansion” helped bring this biopic to life. One might expect critics of the genre to fawn over a film about a classical maestro in pre-revolutionary France who isn’t white. Chevalier does keep the agency entirely with the black protagonist; most of the white characters are antagonists or at best ambivalent friends. The film clearly wanted to avoid any narrative where a white character is the solution to the black hero’s problems. Notably, its pitch was purchased in June 2020, at the height of “BLM summer” and its attendant wave of corporate racial outreach. Yet what makes this movie so remarkable is its avoidance of easy temptations of movie-making in contemporary culture.
Kelvin Harrison Jr. delivers an outstanding performance in the title role, supplying much of the film’s energy and appeal. His confident charisma commands the screen, holding the audience’s attention even through the film’s weaker moments. The directors open with an almost absurd choice: having Bologne engage in a choreographed violin “rap battle” of sorts with Mozart, complete with bluesy scales and frenetic camera work. It is a sensational anachronism, but thanks to Harrison’s magnetism, it is impossible to look away. I promise potential viewers that it only gets better from there. This is just one example of how the tone of the film oscillates between soapy cheekiness (Hamilton; Bridgerton) and earnest period drama (Glory; Free State of Jones). Whether its flamboyant theatricality meshes with the weight of its historical material — I leave that for viewers to decide.
Chevalier does hit familiar beats — childhood trauma, stardom, romantic entanglement, downfall, personal redemption — in a way that a seasoned moviegoer could predict. As expected in contemporary filmmaking, it also foregrounds the racial barriers its black protagonist faces in white society. Yet this does not strip the film of nuance or import. Surprisingly, the film does not unfold as a racial tragedy in which the protagonist’s suffering is dictated by an inescapable, systemically racialized fate as immutable as divine will. It rather relies, in a decidedly modern way, on the lead character’s autonomy. But it remains a limited autonomy: that of a lone wolf in a jungle of hostility. In this respect, Chevalier differs from a film like Glory, which social critic Adolph Reed Jr. once suggested “may be the greatest American film ever made.” [1] Glory frames resistance as collective, built on interracial solidarity and sacrifice for a higher cause. Chevalier, by contrast, largely isolates its hero. His journey is one of personal pride whose resistance is an individual act, not a shared struggle — save for two moments: the beginning and the end. Collective revolutionary fervor is nearly an afterthought for most of the film, appearing only as narrative bookends. The opening credits flash the words “prelude to revolution”; only in the final act does citoyen Bologne align with revolutionaries by discarding his wig and aristocratic title and putting his virtuosic gifts in service to a higher cause. However, for the present-day viewer in a social system that incessantly liquidates even the semblance of the independent individual, a heroic portrayal of a self-assertive lead needs no justification.
As a sucker for period pieces, I was completely taken in by Chevalier’s richly mounted setting. The film’s immersive score transports the listener back in time, while its high production quality drenches the visuals in the opulence of the Ancien Régime. Grand, sweeping shots showcase the lushly designed sets for aristocratic salons and opera houses, capturing both the grandeur and rigidity of the time. Large interiors with long and intimidating hallways, as well as sprawling exteriors at courtly mansions, evoke a sense of both freedom and isolation: freedom in the public display of talent and genius, and isolation in the personal spaces where Bologne confronts his exclusion. When the focus shifts to his personal struggles, the camera moves in closer, not just to admire the period costumes, but to invite us into his intérieur, though never dwelling there in the self-indulgent way some biopics do. The film also plays with color to reflect shifting moods. Scenes of musical performance and festive gatherings burst with bright, lively hues, capturing an artistic exuberance that matches Bologne’s brilliance and optimism. By contrast, oppressive court scenes and moments of racial prejudice are rendered in muted tones and tight framing, heightening the sense of tension and entrapment. At times, the color palette veers toward overly drab, suggesting a modern incapacity to feel the warmth and liveliness of that period through the haze of the intervening centuries. At the emotional nadir of the film, jarring editing of an opera performance sweeps Bologne out of his aristocratic circles.
One of the film’s greatest thematic strengths is how it frames Bologne’s overwhelming self-confidence not as a struggle defined primarily by race but as an assertion of his humanity and individual excellence. Chevalier resists the easy pitfalls of contemporary cinematic narratives that might have reduced his story to a simplistic tale of racial oppression. Instead, it presents Bologne as a man determined to define himself on his own terms, emphasizing his mastery of music and fencing. A particularly striking moment comes when his father tells him, “Always be excellent. No one may tear down an excellent Frenchman,” encapsulating the film’s insistence that histories need not center on victimhood. This runs counter to the resignation found in contemporary work on race relations, where, for example, Ta-Nehisi Coates counsels his son that, “We will always be black, you and I.” [2] At the climax, Bologne’s confidence in his own father’s words is undermined in an identity crisis: “One moment I was a man of France. Now I am only a negro.” It takes his mother criticizing the enervating effect of decadent white French people for Bologne to get his inner strength back, albeit via a bizarre walk through a Parisian ghetto of Caribbean immigrants, where he taps into some primordial connection to soulful folk music and subsequently has his hair braided.
Chevalier ignores the issues of neither race nor sex. It frames these as problems of freedom and autonomy rather than simply oppression. The juxtaposition of aristocratic salons and radical underground meetings highlights the tensions of the era, and the voice of revolution emerges in a freedwoman’s poignant observation:
The greatest evil is not what they have done to our bodies. It is what they have done to our minds...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.
Moments like this and characters like Bologne’s Jacobin best friend, the Duke of Orléans (the father of Louis Philippe, the last King of France), ground the film in the ideological ferment of the time, making clear that Bologne’s struggle was part of a broader, incipient bourgeois revolutionary consciousness. The film succeeds in capturing the era’s decadence and hypocrisy without descending into camp. Its portrayal of Marie Antoinette, for instance, is appropriately dismissive of her self-importance, culminating in one of Bologne’s final lines to her: “Not everything is about you people. That is the point.” It is a striking rebuke that may as well have been a rallying cry for the Third Estate.
If there is one deficiency worth noting, it is that the film’s narrative focuses on Bologne’s love affairs, which comes at the expense of fully exploring his remarkable achievements both before and during the French Revolution. His musical innovations and his military leadership in the French Revolution’s first all-Black regiment are given only cursory attention as the closing credits roll. That said, the emphasis on his romantic struggles is not irredeemable. It becomes an exploration of one of the most beautiful freedoms in civil society: bourgeois love. Midway through the film, Bologne is chastised for assuming “that love and marriage have anything to do with one another.” The conceit is that his exclusion from this private sphere due to social barriers propels him toward radicalism, reinforcing the film’s thematic emphasis on freedom. His deepest connection is with Marie-Joséphine, who speaks for them both when she expresses exasperation at having to “pretend to not be at all troubled by my lack of autonomy. But only for so long.” The last word of the film is the incessant chanting of “Liberté!”
Despite minor criticisms, Chevalier remains a compelling film, offering a fresh and thoughtful view of a fascinating figure in a pivotal historical era. It is a film that not only tells Bologne’s story but also raises deeper questions about creativity, identity, and agency. My disappointment in its lackluster reception only grows with each re-watch. Chevalier succeeds where so many historical dramas falter: it resists easy moralizing and embraces the ambiguities of its object. That alone makes it one of the most interesting and provocative historical films in decades, even if an audience fit to appreciate it is yet to be cultivated. What redeems its quality as a work of art is its untimeliness.
NOTES
[1] Adolph Reed, "The Trouble With Uplift," The Baffler, no. 41 (September 2018), https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-trouble-with-uplift-reed.
[2] Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 79.