By rights, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, would sit alongside Mozart, Handel, and Bach as a virtuosic composer who revolutionized classical music. He was a sensation in pre-Revolutionary France, thrilling the aristocracy with his performances and compositions. Queen Marie Antoinette was a patron. During the French Revolution, he led a battalion to fight against the monarchical system that once celebrated him. And yet, despite his many accomplishments and gifts, Bologne doesn’t share his peers’ cultural ubiquity. The reason can be traced back to Napoleon Bonaparte. After Bologne’s death, the French emperor ordered the destruction of many of his compositions. The attempted erasure was part of his campaign to reinstate slavery in the French colonies, including in Bologne’s ancestral home of Guadeloupe.
Joseph Bologne’s Blackness is the chief reason Chevalier will be many people’s first introduction to his remarkable story and talent. The film follows Bologne (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) as he stages a performance to become the Paris Opera’s lead conductor. It also explores how he negotiated his racial identity in France’s seemingly polite but ultimately hostile political climate, already unsettled by whispers of an impending revolution. Bologne finds through his experiences across the social spectrum that his Blackness trumps his exceptionality, his wealthy white audiences will always see him as inferior, and neither fact should diminish how he views himself.
For the cast and crew of Chevalier, the film allowed them to celebrate Joseph Bologne’s musical gifts and establish him as a transformative cultural figure.
“I wanted to lean into Joseph Bologne as a revolutionary,” director Stephen Williams said in an interview with Geek Vibes Nation. “He was a musical revolutionary and a literal revolutionary in the war, but Bologne also undergoes an internal revolution. He comes into a greater sense of self-awareness and knowledge, regardless of the onerous social context in which he found himself. By the movie’s end, he is triumphant and empowered. For me, that’s what the movie is about.”
Getting there required significant research into Bologne’s life, a substantial challenge due to Bonaparte’s efforts. Screenwriter Stefani Robinson first discovered him in high school, in a book from her mother about the untold stories of notable people of color. His story stuck with her as she became a screenwriter and was top of mind when she started thinking about her first script. Williams had been unfamiliar with Bologne’s story until he read Robinson’s screenplay. Together, they sought as much information on him as available, starting with Gabriel Banat’s book The Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow. Alongside reading and searching online, Robinson traveled to Paris to visit some places Bologne frequented.
“Every piece of information I could find [on Bologne] was helpful,” Robinson said. “I did my best to fact-check, but taking in things that might not have been true, rumors or contradictory facts about him, was useful. Anything that crashed the myth and legend of this person.”
From the beginning, Robinson and Williams agreed that Chevalier would not be a traditional biopic. “We thought of the film as a mash-up of what actually happened and a series of imaginings that we thought were truthful and, hopefully, spiritually honored Joseph Bologne.”
Chevalier’s contemporary and playful tone reflects that sense of narrative freedom. It also aligns with how they constructed Bologne’s character, modeling him after 20th-century Black musicians. Williams said, “Joseph was the Prince or Jimi Hendrix of his time; he was a rock star. We wanted that kind of contemporary energy coursing through the film.”
Harrison Jr. latched onto that energy portraying Bologne. “I loved how feisty and defiant he was,” Harrison Jr. said. “I thought he was really unapologetic about who he was and what he wanted to put out there. He kind of laughed at the French aristocracy, and I was into the gag.”
He continued, “I wanted to make sure Joseph’s showmanship and Caribbean influence on his compositions was intact because that’s where his heart is. Everything else is mostly for entertainment purposes, to ensure audiences connect with and relate to him. I’m not acting for audiences of the 1700s. I’m acting for audiences of 2023. I want them to feel who he was at the time. He was Prince of 18th-century France.”
What proved more challenging for Harrison Jr. was reconciling his character’s modernity with the era’s structural limitations. “It was tricky from a historical point of view to imagine how a Black man, who is such an anomaly in the space, would deal with Marie Antoinette, Marie-Josephine, and these different characters. How does he navigate that? You can’t find that in history books, so you take on a lot of imagination and emotional work.”
Chevalier’s emotional narrative is built around Bologne’s relationships with the women in his life: Marie Antoinette, his lover Marie Josephine, and his mother, Nanon. Robinson wanted them to be as complex as Bologne, working in concert to contextualize his experiences. “In a way, they are all mirrors that reveal something different in him. Then, he can take the information and make choices for himself.”
The most meaningful relationship in Chevalier is with Nanon, the enslaved woman whose infant son was ripped out of her arms by his father and her assailant. When they reunite in Bologne’s adulthood, the strain is undeniable.
“I don’t think Nanon is surprised by [the strain],” said Ronke Adekoluejo, who played Nanon. “It’s hurtful, but she hasn’t seen him in a long time. A boy was taken away from her. She didn’t have the opportunity to raise him and instill in him confidence in his Blackness.”
Bologne struggles throughout Chevalier to reconcile his Blackness with the white, wealthy spaces he participates in. “He’s been severed from [his Blackness],” Adekoluejo explains. “He’s been told that is negative and sad, and there’s pain, death, and all this other stuff.” Those lessons also accompany his father’s insistence that he could move freely within society by being the best and a “proud Frenchman.” Although first articulated two centuries after his death, respectability politics shapes Bologne’s worldview and relationships. It blinds him to the transactional nature of his place in society until he loses everything he thought was important to him.
Harrison Jr. explains, “One of the story points I was most invested in was navigating what happens to a child when they’re stripped from their home and community, and they’re told they need to assimilate into a culture that doesn’t even speak their language. From there, they’re told they are special because of their gifts. People want you simply for what you offer them. Your currency and entertainment for them. How does a child process that?”
He continues, “The story became less about Joseph becoming director of the Paris Opera and more about a little boy, stripped from his home where music was celebrated as a place of escape and joy for his people. He’s identified that with being the director of the Paris Opera. What he’s looking for love and community from people who look like and celebrate him. He doesn’t know what that is yet, so he’s on that journey of redefining and re-exploring his roots.”
With Nanon, Bologne does just that, first when she takes him to a Black street party. “There’s something about the beat moving through you,” Adekoluejo says of that scene. “And being around people where your laughter sounds the same. You’re not walking through the streets as Joseph. You get to disappear and be another Black man in this space.”
Harrison Jr. describes another critical moment between him and Nanon. “There is a beautiful scene where she gives him cornrows, which is historically symbolic of escape routes for slaves. For her, it’s a moment of joy and helping him find his escape route. How do you get back to your peace?”
Nanon explains to her son that that the damage slavery does to Black people’s minds is worse than the damage to their bodies. For the cast and crew, that moment speaks to Chevalier’s core. “It is about a revolution of thinking,” Williams said. “It’s important to take control of one’s voice and one’s position in the world. Everybody has a voice inside them talking; you just have to get quiet and listen carefully.”
Chevalier restores Joseph Bologne’s voice, bringing it to people that Williams hopes will be inspired to learn more about him and his music. The film also affirms that Napoleon Bonaparte, often cited as one of the world’s greatest military commanders, failed this campaign.
“Napoleon tried to silence, suppress, and erase Joseph,” Williams said. “Yet, people are listening to his music and rediscovering him. So Napoleon didn’t win in the long run.”
When you discard the wigs, costumes, music, and complex socio-political themes, Williams had a relatively simple goal with Chevalier, which links Bologne’s story to more familiar names, ranging from Prince to Black Panther.
“I wanted to make a movie about an empowered and triumphant Black hero,” Williams declared.
Chevalier will debut in theaters on April 21, 2023 courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
A late-stage millennial lover of most things related to pop culture. Becomes irrationally irritated by Oscar predictions that don’t come true.