Joseph Bologne was the illegitimate offspring of a French plantation owner and an African slave who, thanks to a combination of his father’s prestige and his already prodigious gift for playing the violin, was enrolled at a prestigious French boarding school, where his talents as a musician and as a fencer helped him not only overcome the cruelties of some of his classmates but also earner him the noble title of Chevalier de Saint Georges, allowing him to rub shoulders with the cream of the crop of 18th-century Parisian society. This is a fascinating story deserving of an equally fascinating screen treatment but while Stephen Williams’s Chevalier should expose his work and legacy to many who had never heard of him before, it somehow manages to transform his extraordinary story into an extra-ordinary one thanks to hit largely formulaic take on his life.
The film certainly starts out on a high point, to be sure, with a wonderfully entertaining sequence that promises great things ahead. In it, we see a concert performance featuring Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Joseph Prowen) wowing the crowd with a combination of technical virtuosity and undisguised arrogance that is suddenly interrupted by an audience member who wishes to play along stage with him. This is Bologne (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who proceeds to wipe the floor with Mozart so thoroughly that all he can do when it is all over is wonder “Who the fuck is that guy?” With its flashy cinematic style and puckish sense of humor—sort of like a more staid version of those crazy-ass pseudo-biographies that Ken Russell made a cottage industry out of in the Seventies—it is a lively introduction to both the film and Bologne that promises fascinating things to come.
After going through a quick review of his childhood, the film returns to find Bologne navigating the corridors of power, even rubbing shoulders with no less a figure than Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton), while yearning to be named to the prestigious position of head of the Paris Opera. To that end, he and his main rival are challenged to each compose an opera and the creator of the winner will get the job. To star in his project, Bologne casts Marie-Jospehine (Samara Weaving), the wife of the powerful Marquis De Montalembert (Marton Csokas), and the two inevitably fall into a passionate affair. Alas, between the number of powerful toes that he has stepped on along the way, including a celebrated singer (Minnie Driver) whose flirtations he rejected and the Marquis, who does not want his beloved wife appearing on the stage, and the inevitable limitations society placed on people with his skin color, Bologne finds himself rejected by the very same people who had previously celebrated him and contemplating joining up with the revolution that is brewing in the streets.
As I said earlier, the opening sequence featuring the musical duel between Bologne and Mozart is a keeper, Harrison is undeniably charismatic in the title role and Weaving, Boynton and Driver are entertaining in their supporting turns. However, as things go on, the screenplay becomes more far more familiar and uninteresting as it shifts focus to the forbidden affair between Bologne and Marie-Josephine and turns into a mediocre riff on Shakespeare In Love and then unsuccessfully tries to throw the early stirrings of the French Revolution into the mix as well. Another problem is that the chief antagonist, Marquis De Montalembert, proves to be a big letdown, thanks mostly to some spotty writing by Stefani Robinson and a fatally bland performance by Csokas in the part. The result is not necessarily a terrible movie, I suppose, and those with a taste for costume dramas like Bridgerton may get a kick out of it. I just feel the Chevalier, both the film and the man himself, deserved a more formally and dramatically unique approach to his story than the one deployed here.
Although it takes place in medieval France and is centered on a hunchback named Quasimodo, Quasi, the latest from the Broken Lizard comedy troupe (their first since Super Troopers 2), has virtually nothing to do with Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, no doubt much to the relief of Mr. Hugo. In this goof, Quasi (Steve Lemme) is an amiable hunchback working in a torture chamber with hut-mate Duchamp (Kevin Heffernan, who also directed) to perfect his greatest creation; the Rack. Although mocked and reviled as a freak by his fellow villagers, his luck seemingly begins to change when he is first unexpectedly befriended by Queen Catherine (Adrienne Palicki), the new wife of King Guy (Jay Chandrasekhar), and then wins a lottery prize (with a ticket forced upon him by Duchamp, much to his jealous regret) of a private confession with Pope Cornelius (Paul Soter), who is arriving in time to celebrate Pope Week and attend Catherine’s coronation. After winning, things take a decided turn when he is summoned to meet King Guy, who orders him to take advantage of the privacy of the confessional to murder Pope Cornelius. If that weren’t bad enough, the intended target uses the confession as an excuse to order Quasi to kill the king—turns out there is a lot of bad blood between them. With the help of Catherine, who learns that she will become expendable if the killing of the Pope goes off, Quasi tries to figure a way out of his seemingly impossible situation and hilarity, as it were, results.
Although I am generally a fan of Broken Lizard’s cheerfully silly brand of stoner humor that mixes broad sight gags and slapstick with moments of sly wit (I once found myself laughing so hard at a joke in their underrated slasher parody Club Dread that I had to step out of the screening room for a couple of minutes to compose myself), I concede that their more recent efforts have been somewhat erratic and that is clearly the case with Quasi. There are some very funny moments on hand here—there is an inspired running gag about a guy (Erik Stolhanske) who volunteers to help test the Rack and finds himself becoming taller as a result and I also like the bit where a tavern scene breaks out into a sing-along to “Freres Jacques”—and Lemme is reasonably funny and sympathetic in the title role. However, the second half begins to focus more on the machinations of the plot—something that is almost always the kiss of death in what is clearly meant to be a slapdash farce—and the jokes become a lot more scatological in tone without becoming much funnier and one bit in particular, involving a log, a nail and a certain body part, goes on for so long that whatever trace amounts of humor it might have initially contained are used up long before the scene comes to its merciful end. Quasi is a film aimed squarely at the Broken Lizard fan base and while they may find themselves laughing enough to make it worth their time, I suspect that even they would have preferred something a little more challenging than this.