‘Chevalier’ Review: An Electric Kelvin Harrison Jr. Can’t Quite Save The Biopic Clichés Of A Revisionist Black Mozart [TIFF]

As history lessons go, it’s a fascinating one: Joseph Bologne, born to a married plantation proprietor in the French colony of Guadeloupe and a Creole woman held as a slave there, would grow up to attain such repute as a violinist, composer, and conductor that he was granted the title of Chevalier de Saint-Georges then and “the Black Mozart” now. In the pitchy biopic “Chevalier,” he earns this sobriquet in a literal capacity by storming into a concert from Wolfgang himself, already in progress, challenging him to a violin battle, and owning him so hard that the crowd bursts into a rabid standing ovation.

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This never happened, obviously, though the Chevalier (played by an electric Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) was roomies with Mozart for nine and a half weeks in 1778. But director Stephen Williams (a TV journeyman whose feature work in the ’90s helped launch a new aesthetic of Black Canadian cinema) and writer Stefani Robinson (of “Atlanta” and “What We Do in the Shadows” acclaim) have announced their intentions. We’re in for a revisionist Social Studies 101 session with a fiery motivation: it’s time for a man of color minimized by posterity to get his due. 

Though the film starts and finishes with swaggering demonstrations of politicized revolt, the rest lapses into the conventions of a genre fatally attached to them. The Chevalier was a pre-Liszt classical rock star, and his big-screen vehicle treats him in much the same way as treatments for modern musical geniuses. Though the particulars of his rise and fall may be unique to his pre-Revolution moment, their rendering here rehashes a lot of the same old points about how brilliant men transmute their pain into art.

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Our guy had a big chip on his shoulder, carved in by a lifetime of discrimination from racist noblemen who’d only allow him into the upper crust on the condition he withstands their constant dancing-monkey remarks. This triumphant narrative gives him the glory they deprived him, and the period mindsets that it bends are nowhere near as anachronistically pious as in, say, “Enola Holmes.” Even so, the film’s writing ensures there’s a lack of wit, sex appeal, and real fury in a man said to be flush with all three.

For a string player, the Chevalier’s pretty brassy, well-matched to Harrison’s snorting-bull volatility. He’s brazenly confident in his own abilities, left with no other choice than extreme self-assurance in defiance of a world aligned against him. His accomplishments and reputation caught the eye of Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton), just one of the many, many white women shown to lose their minds the instant they make eye contact with this hunky virtuoso. Another was named Marie-Josephine (Samara Weaving), a general’s wife and opera sensation said to have collaborated with the Chevalier on more than just a show.

While their affair created a major scandal after a gossip columnist broke the story in the factual record, Robinson’s script takes its tragic outcome one step further into the realm of emotional button-pushing. Across all these happenings, including subplots with his long-lost mother and his engagement with the rabble-rousing proletariat, the typical biopic issue arises; these events seem sequential rather than causal, a series of things that happened which must be shoved into the mold of a story.

The artificial shaping of his biography’s bullet points is never more apparent than in the scenes that sort him into pat perspectives on race. With his powdered wig a heavy-handed signifier of his code-switching to accommodate the snootiest halls of Parisian power, he finds himself placeless, scorned by the bigots in the professional music community, and laughed at by Caribbean immigrants. As all movies about musicians eventually conclude, he must find himself and play what’s in his heart, which in this case means attending one drum circle with jovial West Indian dancers and getting his hair done in cornrows. This is by-the-book writing, uncharacteristic of Robinson’s sharp, off-kilter sense of humor proven by her prior work. True to form for Williams, however, this does look like a generously-budgeted TV show in its bland gapes at opulence. 

The Chevalier grants his portrayers a wild, galvanizing life and a backlog of spritely music with which to soundtrack it. In return, they give him their reverence and respect withheld for too long, but vaunting a dead person usually also means simplifying them into someone easy to root for. What with Harrison’s combination of sensitive brawn and headstrong likability, the temptation to gaze upon him as more than human is understandable. The fastest bow in Western Europe stands tall as a hero in this film’s flattering light, and young fiddlers looking to him for inspiration have chosen well. All the more disappointing that he’s short on depth in this well-meaning tribute that loses the melody while riffing on the given notes. [C+]

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