MUSICAL REVOLUTION
Shedding light on a forgotten true story…
CHEVALIER
Amusical prodigy stuns 18th-century European high society with his compositional flair. Sound familiar? Well, despite Mozart featuring as a character, Chevalier is no Amadeus retread.
It tells the story of Joseph Bologne (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), born of an enslaved woman and her slave owner, on a plantation on the island of Guadeloupe. Taken to Paris by his father at age 10, he was deposited at an academy and taught how to be a gentleman. Excelling in music, he eventually worked his way into
Parisian society’s upper echelons, becoming a close cohort of Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton). That relationship soured and Joseph ended up playing a pivotal role in the French Revolution that unseated the royal family.
“Our movie is inspired by that little-known true story,” says director Stephen Williams. “He was made a Chevalier by the royal court, was a contemporary of Mozart’s. And his music and life story had largely been consigned to obscurity, in large part through the efforts of Napoleon, who has the dubious distinction of helping France be the only nation to reinstate slavery after it was abolished. And he, as part of his legislative power, decided to consign Joseph and his life story and music to obscurity.
Our movie is, in part, an attempt to redress that erasure.”
Samara Weaving co-stars as opera singer Marie-Josephine, who’s based on “arguably the most significant love affair Joseph had”, as Williams describes it. She and the core cast threw themselves into the music of the period. “My approach,” Williams says of the musical performances, “was to find a way to show that the music Joseph was making at the time was as if Prince or Jimi Hendrix were still around, or more recently somebody like Kendrick Lamar. That energy was what we tried to zero in on.”
Based on the classic and influential 1966 Italian spaghetti western, this revival set in the Old West sees the eponymous drifter (Amsterdam’s Matthias Schoenaerts) travel to a new city for outcasts in search of his long-lost daughter whom he believes has survived after his family was murdered eight years earlier. Expect broodiness, trouble and violence to ensue.