"Belle"

Knowing that Belle was inspired by a painting of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of Royal Navy Captain Sir John Lindsay and niece of Lord Chief Justice William Murray, may not necessarily influence one’s judgment of it as a whole. However, Amma Asante’s rather pointed use of the depiction of black people in Western art as a synchronized marker of their place within Western society inevitably invites comparison between the two works of art that Dido inspired. Or rather more accurately, it begs the question as to what degree Asante’s film draws from painting in general with regards to communicating feelings and atmosphere, as well as examining the relationship between art and politics. The answer to the first question is, regrettably, “to a rather limited one”. Amma Asante and cinematographer Ben Smithard certainly know how to elegantly frame and compose scenes of rural upper-class England, but their vision seems less inspired by 18^th century painting than the British tradition of period dramas it follows, with its bright and lukewarm colours that flatter the actors as well as the scenery.

The answer to the second question is more nuanced, as Amma Asante does make some good observations on how one is affected by the image of oneself or one’s fellows, but they are almost divorced from painting aesthetics. The racist portrayals of blacks in subservient spatial or physical positions as well as attitudes is repeatedly emphasized via tight close-ups, and the unveiling of the painting showing Belle and her adoptive sister/cousin playing together on equal footing is narratively framed to precede – and thus, it is implied, participate in – William Murray’s decision to rule against a powerful slave trading syndicate, but this reduces the paintings themselves to a thematic background rather than a subject. The issue of representation and self-image is explored more substantially and subtly in individual scenes. The most powerfully evocative of these has Dido (an outstanding Gugu Mbatha-Raw) looking at herself in a mirror and repeatedly hitting her chest and face in frustration and despair, as if hoping that would somehow whiten the skin that prevents her from dining with her own family in the presence of guests.

It’s in scenes like these that Amma Asante deploys the crux of her talent. Classical but not pedantic, she diligently sets the stage for her characters’ emotions in order to better magnify them at the right moments. And in Gugu Mbatha-Raw she finds a very expressive partner indeed, one who speaks with eloquence typical of British television where she cut her teeth but who moves and gazes at her costars with purely cinematic earnestness and eyes that could burn through concrete. So efficient is Asante at bringing out the many conflicts travailing Dido and her family and recognizing their paradoxical source – a desire to shelter her from societal injustice and elevate her above it all while preventing her from causing any upsets – that her occasional inclination toward unnecessary and commonplace dramatic underscoring (shots of a character giving an inspiring speech intercut with zooms on the face of another man listening in the distance being the most obvious) are easily forgiven.

While Belle could have benefited from a form that more closely reproduced the style and worldview articulated by 18^th century British art and perhaps a closer look at the effects of artistic representation on self-image, it nonetheless stands on its own as a handsome and mature study of the complexities of racism and sexism and how they intersect.