King Creole: Kelvin Harrison Jr. Is a Classical Music Star in 18th-Century France in Chevalier

CHEVALIER 
(Stephen Williams, USA, 2023, PG-13, 117 minutes) 

One glance at an any random encyclopedia entry for Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges is all it takes to understand why this little-known classical musician and composer merits a major motion picture: the semi-illegitimate son of a 16-year-old slave, Saint-Georges scaled the highest of heights in Marie Antoinette-era France. 

Like Saint-Georges, director Stephen Williams has West Indian roots--Kingston, Jamaica, in his case. After establishing his directorial bona fides in Canada, where he grew up, Williams went on to a thriving career in American television, including high-profile shows like Lost and Watchmen. 

If I didn't know his subject was a real person, I would assume he was pure fiction, not least when Williams opens the film with an unlikely violin duel between the obscure Saint-Georges (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and the celebrated Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Joseph Prowen). The latter would famously inspire Peter Shaffer's Tony-winning play, Amadeus, which would, in turn, provide the raw material for Miloš Forman's Oscar-winning adaptation in whose shadow most classical music biopics tend to pale. 

In Chevalier, Mozart is a bit player, and he won't return after Saint-Georges convinces the musician and composer to let him share the stage. The upstart doesn't even have an instrument with him, so an orchestra member loans him his violin. The look on Mozart's face indicates that he plans to put this gatecrasher in his place, but Saint-Georges knocks him--and the rouged and powdered audience--out with his virtuosic playing (in real life, Saint-Georges was 11 years Mozart's senior). None of this struck me as especially believable, though Harrison, who has been playing since childhood, makes for a convincing violinist. 

From there, Williams takes a brief look back at Saint-Georges's youth.  Product of a liaison between George Bologne (Jim High), a French plantation owner, and Nanon (Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo), a Senegalese-Guadeloupian slave, he enters life as a free man when Bologne gives him his name and sends him to France's finest schools, but a slave master is still a slave master, no matter how ornately he gilds the lily. Bologne doesn't, for instance, marry Nanon--like most such men, he was already married, after all--but some time after she is freed, Saint-Georges invites her to live with him once he has established himself in French society. 

So, the father gives the son a fighting chance, and he takes it. If Saint-Georges must contend with every manner of bigotry along the way, his talent can't be denied. So far so good, except things take a soap operatic turn when he meets the unhappily married Marie-Josephine (Ready or Not's Samara Weaving) who longs to star in his opera Ernestine (with a libretto by Les Liaisons Dangereuses author Pierre Choderlos de Laclos). 

Her military general husband, Marc René, Marquis de Montalembert (Asylum's Marton Csokas), doesn't want her to have anything to do with music--or a certain Black man--but when he leaves for an extended trip abroad, she throws caution to the wind, wins the part, and gains a lover. 

Harrison and Weaving are fine, but the script from Stefani Robinson (Atlanta, What We Do in the Shadows) doesn't allow them to be much more than symbols. She's talented and beautiful, and he's much the same, except he's Black, so they can't wed, because interracial marriage was illegal under Code Noir. Even if it wasn’t, her hothead husband could cause grievous harm to one or the both of them--and get away with it, too. 

Saint-Georges must also contend with Antoinette (Bohemian Rhapsody's Lucy Boynton), a powerful supporter who distances herself when it serves her purposes, and La Guimard (Beyond the Lights' Minnie Driver), a diva who offers to help him out professionally if he'll help her out in a more personal way. At risk to his career, he resists her advances, and she spends the rest of the film looking aggrieved in proto-goth lipstick. 

Chevalier won praise for Harrison's performance when it premiered at Toronto last year, and that inspired me to check it out, having admired his work since 2017's It Comes at Night. He also appeared in Trey Schultes' follow-up, Waves, but he gives his trickiest, most nuanced performance to date in Julius Onah's Luce. In it, he plays an Eritrea-born star athlete raised by a well meaning American couple, played by Funny Games duo Naomi Watts and Tim Roth. Luce served as a child soldier, and no one knows what that entailed--and whether his carefully-molded model citizen veneer is cover for a ticking time bomb capable of great violence. 

In the years since, he's played singers and guitarists in Elvis and on FX's Godfather of Harlem. In retrospect, those roles feel like dress rehearsal for his first leading role as a musician. 

If I'm convinced that Harrison is capable of greatness, Chevalier doesn’t quite get him there, but top-lining a prestigious studio picture will surely help to create more such opportunities in the future. One way or the other, I'm glad this film was made. It doesn't hurt that it involves so many people of color behind the scenes, including composer and arranger Michael Abels, who worked on all three of Jordan Peele's feature films. 

More people, especially those outside of the classical music community, should know about Saint-Georges. In addition to his many operas, symphonies, and concertos--most lost due to Napoleon's racist edits--he was also a dedicated abolitionist and a formidable fencer. After over two centuries, he's finally having a moment, since he also appears in The Favourite co-writer Deborah Davis's new BBC series Marie Antoinette. I only wish Chevalier was a deeper and richer tribute to his talents. 

 

Chevalier opens on Friday, June 21, at the Regal Meridian, AMC Seattle 10, and Regal Thornton Place, among other area theaters. Images: Searchlight Pictures (Kelvin Harrison Jr. with and without Samara Weaving) and Larry Horricks/Searchlight Pictures (Harrison with Joseph Prowen). 

Sometimes You Are the Pigeon, and Sometimes You Are the Statue: On Showing Up

SHOWING UP 
(Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2023, rated R, 108 minutes)

*****

 "You have to accept the fact that sometimes you are the pigeon, and sometimes you are the statue."--Claude Chabrol

Showing Up is not without incident. Things happen and characters react to them, but the events are so seemingly trivial that a viewer, especially one unfamiliar with the sly work of Portland writer/director Kelly Reichardt, could be forgiven for watching the first 20 minutes, and then wondering, "When does the film begin in earnest--when do the big things start to happen?" That viewer would be waiting in vain, because they don't. 

Reichardt starts by introducing Lizzy (a brunette Michelle Williams in her fourth go-round with the filmmaker), a disinterestedly-dressed, socially awkward visual artist. By day, she works at Oregon College of Art and Craft (a 112-year-old institution that abruptly closed for good in 2019). 

In her off-hours, Lizzy works on ceramic sculptures of women in various poses (created by multimedia artist Cynthia Lahti). With her garage door half-open, the rustle and coo of pigeons soundtracks her artistic labors. After she finishes each piece, she applies glaze, places it in a tray with her other most recent figurines, and then fires them in the school's kiln.  

At the outset, she's preparing for a gallery show, so she isn't exactly an unknown quantity in the local arts community, but she isn't as successful as former OCAC classmate Jo (The Whale's Hong Chau), a sunny, easily distracted apartment manager and textile artist who is preparing for two gallery shows of her own.

Reichardt and co-writer Jonathan Raymond (Meek's Cutoff) don't explicitly point out the differences between the women--named after his daughters--but they become apparent in subtle, yet significant ways. Lizzy's work is small, figurative, and breakable, while Jo's work is large, abstract, and pliable. It requires more of a physical effort and takes up more space. 

One morning before dawn, Lizzy hears a thump in the bathroom. She gets up to investigate. To her horror, she finds her orange tabby, Ricky, circling an injured pigeon. She shews away the cat, scoops up the bird with a broom, and pushes it out the window, saying, "Go die somewhere else."

Presumably, she feels bad. Or maybe she doesn't, but she attempts to move on with her life. What might prove a random incident in another film incites everything in this one, because Jo greets her the next day with the pigeon swaddled in a box. She found it that morning and assumed the neighborhood tomcat caused the injury. Lizzy doesn't correct her, but she can't move on with her life after all, because Jo ropes her into caring for the bird. Lizzy doesn't know how to say no, and they'll spend the next few days bandaging its wing, visiting a vet, and trading pigeon-sitting duty. 

On the surface, that's the gist of the film, except the incident awakens something in Lizzy. There are no declarations or grand statements, and nor does she end up a completely different person by the end. 

Instead, Reichardt fills in the contours of her life--which now includes pigeon care. If Lizzy appears to lack close friends, she isn't alone. She has a divorced father, Bill (Judd Hirsch, a recent Oscar nominee like Chau and Fabelmans costar Williams), and mother, Jean (Maryann Plunkett), and a brother, Sean (John Magaro from Reichardt's First Cow), with a history of mental illness. 

Prickly by nature, Lizzy doesn't have an openly affectionate relationship with any of them, but they aren't combative either, and everyone worries whenever Sean goes on a walkabout. Reichardt also amusingly reveals that the boss with whom she has a chilly rapport just happens to be her mother, so Lizzy has hardly distanced herself from her artistic parents. 

If it's clear that Lizzy is jealous of Jo, the latter is consistently, sincerely encouraging, but she also keeps making excuses for the delays in fixing her hot water heater. Reichardt suggests that she's so preoccupied with her upcoming shows that she's let her apartment manager duties slide. And yet, unlike Lizzy, she’s a savior of animals. People are complicated.  

Lizzy's entanglements with all of these people converge at her gallery opening. Up until that point, I was a little disappointed by the lack of overtly consequential incidents, and Reichardt certainly creates opportunities for that sort of thing. When Lizzy needs to fire up her clay creations, for instance, she seeks out ceramics instructor Eric (actor/musician André Benjamin, who supplies the flute doodles on the soundtrack). While Lizzy can be tense and anxious, he's the epitome of self-possessed chill with his "We'll make it work" mantra. Eric becomes neither friend nor love interest--he's just a person in her life. 

By that measure, the pigeon is more important to the story--sorry, André--linking the film to 2008's Wendy and Lucy, a prior Portland film with a brunette Michelle Williams in which she plays a vagabond whose only real friend and companion is her steadfast yellow lab, Lucy (played by Reichardt's own dog). Similarly, Ricky serves as Lizzy's only real friend and companion until the pigeon situation opens up new possibilities. 

Wendy and Lucy was a deceptively modest film with a heartbreaking ending. Showing Up, however, ends on the opposite note. In Reichardt agnostic Richard Brody's New Yorker review, he claims the director's eighth feature--"a masterwork"--as her first great movie. I would counter that they're all pretty great, but Showing Up just might be her best.   

  

Showing Up opens at the Cinemark in Bellevue on Friday, April 21, and at Grand Illusion Cinema the week of May 19. Images: A24/Deadline (Michelle Williams), Paris-LA (Williams with Ricky the cat), and Allyson Riggs/A24 via AP (Hong Chau with and without André Benjamin). 

Me and the Devil Walking Side by Side: On the Evocative Fragrances of The Five Devils

THE FIVE DEVILS / Les Cinque Diables 
(Léa Mysius, 2022, France, 96 minutes) 

It's hard to resist a film that opens with a slow-burn cover of Robert Johnson's eerie 1937 blues lament "Me and the Devil," a song I know best from Gil Scott-Heron's glitchy, heartfelt rendition on his final album, 2010's I'm New Here. 

As the song plays, the opening credits unspool over scenes of a very pretty, very remote village in the Rhône-Alpes, after which filmmaker Léa Mysius introduces Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos, a beautiful woman with a goofy smile that rarely materializes here), a pool aerobics instructor at the Five Devils Sports Center. Her Senegalese-born husband, Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue), is a firefighter and their eight-year-old daughter, Vicky (Sally Dramé), accompanies Joanne when she teaches class. 

A wiry kid with a nimbus of curls and big, expressive eyes, Vicky also times Joanne as she practices swimming across a frigid lake and back. Later, when asked why she does this, Joanne explains, "I like it." 

When they walk through the woods, Vicky collects items that she stores in mason jars. These olfactory snapshots reflect the way she senses the world--she's even bottled her mother's scent in a jar labeled "Joanne." It's fortunate that Vicky, who is biracial, has a good relationship with her mother, because classmates make fun of her. It's also fortunate for Joanne, because she lacks any discernible social life.

It isn't initially clear why Joanne, a former beauty queen, is so glum, or why the spark has gone out of her marriage, but her expression grows glummer still when Jimmy's estranged, possibly alcoholic sister Julia (Swali Amati) returns to town. Vicky claims that she smells like peat whisky. 

Mysius, co-writer with cinematographer Paul Guilhaume, does an excellent job in patiently constructing the setup piece by piece: establishing the family dynamic, exploring their differences from the larger community, and then adding an unexpected catalyst to throw a spanner into the already-unsteady works. It isn't her first script; Mysius also co-wrote Ava, her feature-length debut, in addition to Jacques Audiard's Paris, 13th District (with Céline Sciamma) and Claire Denis's Stars at Noon.

While furtively rifling through Julia's belongings, Vicky finds a strange-smelling bottle, and places it in her pocket. Later, she fills a jar with substances that smell like Julia, including a splash of the mysterious liquid, shakes it up, takes a whiff, and passes out. When she wakes up, she's in a completely different place--and time. 

Soon, Vicky finds herself having visions of Joanne, Jimmy, and Julia as teenagers. Mysius doesn't mention race directly, but Vicky and Julia are often depicted as the only Black women in any space they occupy, though their differences go beyond race, since they share a unique psychic bond. 

From these visions, Vicky learns things about her parents that she didn't know, including the nature of Joanne's relationships with Julia and Nadine (Benedetta's Daphne Patakia), a Five Devils colleague with significant facial scarring. As teenagers, the three were part of the same gymnastic troupe, and Joanne met Jimmy through Julia. Beyond the supernatural angle, The Five Devils is a story about family and generational trauma. 

It's also a story about small town intolerance. Just as the villagers see Vicky as an outsider, they see Julia the same way. They remember her from things that happened 10 years ago. If anything, her presence ramps up their intolerance in ways that recall Stephen King/Brian De Palma's Carrie, albeit on a more modest scale. 

As Vicky mixes up more potions, she has more visions, but she doesn't just see Julia in the past--Julia sees her in the future. In the present, Julia warns Vicky that she's opening up a hornet's nest, but it helps the girl to understand why her parents are so glum. In the end, though, Vicky is just a kid, and it’s up to the adults to address their long buried secrets. 

If Mysius explains the family mystery, she doesn't explain the power that Vicky and Julia share. In that respect, The Five Devils isn't a conventional horror movie, because Vicky uses her heightened sense of smell for understanding rather than for taking revenge on name-calling brats. 

Her understanding comes to include same-sex attraction, something this attractive, if oppressive town seems as likely to view with suspicion as racial and cultural differences. The film's conclusion is open-ended enough to suggest that the family members just might get their shit together now that they can no longer live in denial. 

The essential story is as old as time, since there's nothing new about unhappy couples who would rather remain unhappy than face the truth, but Mysius finds a novel way to reveal it. Though Exarchopoulos, versatile star of The Class and Blue Is the Warmest Color, provides the marquee name, most everything plays out through Vicky's eyes, and Sally Dramé gives the most engaging performance, not least because, in a film about inheritance, this bright spirit doesn't seem to have inherited her parents' tendency towards gloominess. If there's a devil in this film--it isn't her. 

And if the ending doesn't quite fulfill the promise of the beginning, Mysius and cast, including newcomers Dramé and Amati, conjure up a riveting atmosphere. Low on scares, The Five Devils is rich with intrigue. 

 

The Five Devils opens at The Grand Illusion on Friday, April 21. It premieres on streaming, through MUBI, on May 12. Images: IMDb (Sally Dramé in faceted shades and Adèle Exarchopoulos with Moustapha Mbengue), Film Affinity (Exarchopoulos), MUBI ( Exarchopoulos), and Unifrance (Exarchopoulos with Swali Amati and a Bonnie Tyler number).

Risto Jarva's Time of Roses: Imagining the Finland of the Future in the Late-1960s

TIME OF ROSES / Ruusujen Aika 
(Risto Jarva, Finland, 1969, 108 minutes) 

Much like The Unknown Man of Shandigor, which Deaf Crocodile reissued in 2022, Time of Roses is the kind of stylish euro-whatsit that hasn't been seen enough since its original release to have a significant international reputation (though it did play Cannes and New York in 1970). If that wasn't the case, Risto Jarva's fifth film might be cited, along with Elio Petri's The 10th Victim or Godard's Alphaville, as one of the more imaginative, low-budget science fiction features of the 1960s.

It doesn't help that Time of Roses is Finnish. Beyond Aki Kaurismäki, Finnish film hasn't gotten much of a foothold in the US beyond a few filmmakers, like Mikko Niskanen (Eight Deadly Shots, which plays New York's Film Forum through April 6) and, more recently, Juho Kuosmanen (The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, Compartment No. 6).

Jarva starts by introducing characters dressed in retro-futurist garb. The year is 2012. The men look like court jesters with their poplin vests and tights and the women look like Marimekko models with their mod makeup and architectural hairstyles. The furnishings include inflatable chairs and sofas--the kind that would get destroyed in an instant by a stray cigarette or a cat's claws (the film is devoid of both). When these modsters would like a drink or a bite to eat, they simply push a few buttons, and in a matter of minutes: food and beverages magically appear. 

Early on, TV documentarian Raimo Lappalainen (Arto Tuominen, who recalls Jean-Louis Trintignant from some angles) appears in a film in which he explains that Finland's prosperity in the 1960s gave way to a 15-year period of deprivation, but those days are gone. With assistance from Anu (Tarja Markus), a Twiggy-in-the-'60s type, Raimo has been working on a documentary about Saara Turunen, a model who died in a suspicious car accident in 1976. In a sad irony, director and co-writer Jarva would die in a car accident in 1977. 

A trained historian as much as a filmmaker, Raimo questions people who knew Saara, shifting the film into metaphysical mystery territory, more so when he spots Kisse Haavisto, who resembles Saara, at an art exhibit (Ritva Vepsä plays both bright-eyed brunette women). "They could be identical," he tells Anu, "had they lived in similar circumstances." 

Though she works as an engineer, Kisse's life is as glamorous as that of any model, giving Jarva the opportunity to incorporate psychedelic music and dance sequences. Raimo continues to question people who knew Saara, now with Kisse in tow, freaking them out due to the resemblance. 

The two become romantically involved. Jarva films one particularly kaleidoscopic sex scene entirely through a see-through sofa. 

Raimo recruits Kisse to play Saara in re-creations for his documentary, including fashion shoot-like sequences. Though it won't be obvious to most American viewers, Jarva and co-writers Jaakko Pakkasvirta and novelist/TV presenter Peter von Bagh based Raimo on Finnish journalist Veikko Ennala, who lived a life more more dramatic—including several suicide attempts--than anything Raimo experiences.

The relationship hits a snag when the couple catches a nuclear power plant labor leader talking about a strike on TV, using the phrase "time of roses" to describe the better life the workers seek. Kisse is sympathetic, Raimo isn't. When the leader is shot during the live broadcast, he doesn't even react. 

After a re-creation goes wrong, Raimo becomes the villain Jarva suggested from the start, a journalist who claims objectivity and impartiality, all while attempting to control the actress in his film. Even Kisse suspected he was only interested in her due to her resemblance to Saara, though Jarva never confirms her suspicion as definitively as Alfred Hitchcock does in Vertigo vis-à-vis Det. Scottie Ferguson's obsession with Kim Novak's Judy Barton who resembles the late Madeleine Elster. 

According to Jyrki Siukonen (Living in the Future: Revisiting Time of Roses), "Time of Roses still remains the only representative example of serious science fiction film in Finland." (Siukonen also notes that Peter von Bagh wrote his master's thesis on Vertigo.) Despite the pop art trappings, though, it's ultimately a tragedy about male entitlement and journalistic hypocrisy, making it a little less fun than the other sci-fi films of the era. 

If anything, the story could have taken place in 1969, and the gist would have remained much the same, though that wasn't the intention. As von Bagh explains, "The viewer shouldn't have the impression that the attempt here is but to show the problems of our time in another environment, some sort of allegorical arrangement, for then comes the question of why it wasn't set in our own time in the first place." Strictly from a visual standpoint, though, Jarva's approach adds vibrancy to the scenario. 

Vincent Canby summed things up well in his bemused, if somewhat confused review in The New York Times in 1970, "Time of Roses doesn't occupy the mind, but it does offer some amusing fringe benefits." 

Out in late April in a new 4K restoration from Deaf Crocodile, including a limited edition (of 2,000) embossed slipcover. Also available from Vinegar Syndrome. Images: MUBI (Ritva Vepsä), Elitisti (Tarja Markus and Arto Tuominen), Wikiwand (Vepsä and Tuominen), and Risto Jarva (Vepsä).