Chevalier 2023

In the late 1770s, Paris plays host to a remarkable artistic meeting when the celebrated composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visits the city. During a staged performance, a bold figure steps forward: Joseph de Saint-Georges Kelvin Harrison Jr., who asks to accompany Mozart for Violin Concerto No. 5. At first, the crowd and even Mozart himself underestimate this Black French violinist, dancer, and budding composer. Yet as Saint-Georges takes the stage, his exacting technique, fearless precision, and magnetic presence transform doubt into awe. The two musicians push each other to new heights as they trade and fuse cadenzas in a display of technical virtuosity, culminating in a triumphant collaboration that seizes the audience’s imagination and redefines what a performance can be.

Biographically, Saint-Georges’s life begins far from the glittering salons of Paris. He is born in Guadeloupe to Georges de Bologne Jim High, a white French slaveowner, and Nanon Ronke Adekoluejo, an enslaved woman of African descent. From a young age he shows extraordinary gifts in music, dancing, and fencing, and his father sends him to a boarding school in Paris where he endures harassment, mistreatment, and persistent prejudice from white peers and teachers. Despite these hurdles, he excels academically and artistically, becoming a prodigy whose talents promise a new kind of prestige in a society built on rigid hierarchies. His prowess soon catches the eye of Marie Antoinette Lucy Boynton, who is both charmed by his skill and impressed by his carriage, and she grants him the title of Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a recognition that elevates him into the royal court.

Within the opulent yet fraught world of Versailles and the Parisian salons, Saint-Georges grows into more than a performer. He becomes a favored companion of the Queen and attracts a chorus of admirers, including the captivating Marie-Joséphine Samara Weaving, who is drawn to his brilliance and presence. Yet his ascent does not go unchallenged. He enters a tense alliance with Stéphanie Félicité, comtesse de Genlis, who sees in his artistry a conduit to produce an opera that could demonstrate his talent to the world; Madame De Genlis Sian Clifford is a catalytic force in this collaboration. Marie-Joséphine agrees to be the lead singer of Saint-Georges’s opera despite her husband’s, Marc-René de Montalembert Marton Csokas, consternation and resistance. The politics of the court—fueled by race, gender, and class—complicate every decision, and Saint-Georges finds himself navigating a treacherous path between artistic integrity and the demands of a white-dominated aristocracy.

The personal becomes political when tragedy strikes. After Saint-Georges’s father dies, his mother is freed from enslavement, and he uses his influence to bring her to Paris. Yet as he becomes more visible, his relationship with his mother grows complicated; he begins to feel that she expects him to conform to a social script that demands he hide parts of himself to fit in. This tension deepens as the city and the court wrestle with what it means for a Black man to claim space within a culture built on exclusion. Saint-Georges alternates between defiance and longing for acceptance, and his evolving sense of identity marks him with a powerful, sometimes painful, honesty about who he is and what he represents to others.

As the French Revolution begins to reshape the political landscape, Saint-Georges channels the upheaval into music. He organizes a fundraising concert that aims to support the anti-royalist cause, using the concert as a platform not just for artistry but for social critique. The Queen and Marie-Joséphine each approach him in an effort to restore their influence or to sway him back into their orbit, yet Saint-Georges stands firm. He is warned that his status as Chevalier could be jeopardized, yet he proceeds with the performance, boldly appearing without the powdered wig that once masked his natural hair. The moment becomes a referendum on autonomy and dignity as the audience themselves push back against the authorities trying to suppress him, and Marc-René is forced to yield.

In a moving arc of triumph tempered by consequence, the narrative follows Saint-Georges as he walks away from the court’s pressures and toward a more authentic expression of his self, even as the social tides shift around him. The story closes with a sobering epilogue that anchors his legacy in a larger historical frame: in 1802, Napoleon forbids Chevalier’s music productions and, in a separate, brutal policy shift, re-instates slavery in French colonies. The film’s arc thus threads a throughline from dazzling artistic achievement to the enduring struggle for dignity within a society plagued by inequality.

Overall, the film is a meticulous portrait of a remarkable artist who navigates a life of illumination and obstacle in a world where power, art, and identity collide. Its historical resonances—racial prejudice, imperial politics, and the perpetual tension between personal truth and social expectation—are rendered with a measured, neutral lens that honors the sources while exploring the human drama at its core. The result is a rich, deeply felt narrative that invites audiences to reconsider a familiar period through the lens of a singular, extraordinary musician who refused to be reduced by the boundaries around him.