Chevalier
Sunday, April 30, 2023 12:38:14 PM | (Age Not Specified)
Joseph the Boulogne was a man of accomplishment and a brilliant musician. He was also a charismatic courtier, savvy in the ways of privilege and influence. His music is the object of much interest today, because it is great. You'll learn nothing about this by watching this movie. A minute of his music accompanies the credits at the very end of the film, but that is all. Otherwise, the film builds on an astonishing ignorance and prejudice about pre-revolution France and the people who made the revolution. Here is an assortment of what the movie peddles: opera is boring; Queen Marie Antoinette was a popular/mean girl; Mozart, a bro; Gluck a nobody bureaucrat. About the aristocracy, the film cannot decide. A Marquis embodies all that is evil about privilege, a Marquise all its glamor and goodness. The worst is Joseph the Boulogne himself, a character so limited in his ability to comprehend the world he lives in, he would make the real Joseph de Boulogne cringe. Melodrama is overlaid thickly, but you become engrossed in it at the peril of your own intelligence. The film seeks to produce its own feeble-minded spectator. Forget, for instance, that the revolutionary debates about humanity and enslavement were earnest in the years preceding the revolution, or that the reality of people of color in France was complicated. Forget most assuredly about the real Joseph the Boulogne, or his mother. Boulogne, most disappointingly, is a musician without a voice -- his music is substituted by ditties and melodies sounding familiarly pop, of today. The saving grace: sets and costumes are great; the actors did their best.
