Amma Asante’s powerful, moving and gently subversive romantic melodrama is a finely wrought tale of a woman out of time, a film that plays eloquently upon the heartstrings as it interweaves familiar personal intrigue with stirring social history. Intelligently combining the enticing pleasures of a ripe costume drama with the still shameful legacy and lessons of the slave trade, Belle dresses its entryist agendas in the fashionable finery of a multiplex crowd-pleaser. The result is a handsomely mounted and emotionally engaging drama that smartly examines issues of race, class and gender while leaving nary a dry eye in the house.
Like Girl with a Pearl Earring (both Tracy Chevalier’s novel and Peter Webber’s subsequent film), Misan Sagay’s inventive script takes inspiration from an enigmatic painting upon which the writer projects a heady mix of fact and fantasy. The unsigned picture at the heart of Belle (which once hung in Hampstead’s grand Kenwood House) depicts what Asante calls “a bi-racial girl, a woman of colour, who’s slightly higher than her white counterpart”, a significant placement implying a social equality extraordinary in the late 18th century. But what does the hand of one young woman upon the waist of the other imply – sisterhood or rivalry? And what should we read from the expressions (playful? defiant? mischievous?) upon the faces of the artist’s subjects?
This much we know; that Dido Elizabeth Belle – the illegitimate daughter of a Royal Navy captain, John Lindsay, and an African woman named Maria Belle – was raised at Kenwood House in north London by her great-uncle, Lord Mansfield, where she became companion to her half-cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray. As lord chief justice, Mansfield heard several significant slavery cases, including the 1772 Somerset v Stewart case (which questioned whether slavery was supported by common law), and the Zong ship case, which hinged upon the deliberate drowning of human “cargo”. The latter of these forms the backdrop of Sagay’s narrative, providing an Amistad-like framework for the discussion of human rights versus property law, arcane legal argument circling absolute moral imperative.
Describing her film as a hybrid of “the Jane Austen elements we know so well – the marriage market, the lives of girls growing up into society ladies, the romantic longing – combined with a story about the end of slavery”, Asante paints an enthralling portrait of a woman struggling to define her identity, caught between stairs in terms of social custom and protocol. Too elevated to eat with the servants, yet too lowly to dine (in company, at least) with her “family”, Dido must find her own space in a world in which her colour marks her as unique among her peers.
While this proves problematic enough within the confines of Kenwood House, her situation becomes more complicated still as the prospect of marriage looms, with both Dido and Elizabeth torn between variously unsuitable partners, fortune and standing starkly juxtaposed with love and affection in time-honoured fashion. Meanwhile, Dido’s apparent influence upon the judgment of Lord Mansfield raises more than just eyebrows in polite society, as the country awaits his ruling on a case that cuts to the heart of the still-profitable slave trade.
Having earned her spurs in front of the camera before turning to writing and directing (she started out as one of the young stars of the BBC children’s drama Grange Hill), Asante clearly has an affinity with actors that enables her to get the very best from an impressive ensemble cast. Rising star Gugu Mbatha-Raw is terrific as Dido, a nuanced performance that perfectly embodies the increasingly independent spirit who refuses to accept that – in issues of both race and gender – “we are but their property”.
Tom Wilkinson is excellent, too, as the former idealist turned pragmatist Lord Mansfield, whose revulsion for slavery is matched by a desire not to frighten the horses of the British establishment (more than once, he is told that the country’s economic stability rests upon his ruling).
As Lady Mary Murray, the unmarried keeper of the house whose mantle Dido seems either destined or doomed to inherit, Penelope Wilton raises several tragicomic laughs, her clipped diction and tremulous manner beautifully suggesting both disappointment with, and acceptance of, her unfulfilled lot. Meanwhile, Sam Reid brings something of the charm of a young Christopher Reeve to the part of clergyman’s son John Davinier, a somewhat underwritten role (he teeters occasionally upon worthy caricature) in which he still manages to invest some square-jawed heft.
“I have been blessed with freedom twice over,” Dido tells her soulmate, when financial stability offers the possibility of a future in which the rules of both marital and racial status are overturned. This is the heart of Asante’s enjoyable and uplifting film, which seeks always to broaden its canvas and address the widest possible audience. Building on the promise of her award-winning 2004 debut feature A Way of Life, Belle confirms Asante as an assured and insightful film-maker who knows just how much window dressing a picture requires to make it appealing to the eye. Embracing sentiment without going soft on substance, she hides her stronger purpose beneath a facade of gentility in a manner that would make Jane Austen smile. Bravo!
