Belle: see this movie

[psocoptera]

Belle is an outstanding period romance/drama. All of the "beautiful people in beautiful clothes" eye candy of a Jane Austen movie, but with this powerful sociological/historical underpinning and a little courtroom drama to round things out. If you haven't heard of it, it's a fictionalization based on a real person, Dido Elizabeth Belle, the lefthand subject of this 1779 painting. She was the illegitimate daughter of an English gentleman and an African slave woman, brought up with her (white) cousin in England. The movie is about the complexities of her position in the family and in society, and her possible future prospects, at the same time as her great-uncle/adopted father, the Lord Chief Justice, is ruling on the Zong case, the massacre of 142 enslaved Africans by the crew of a slave ship, which was the subject of this famous painting by Turner (which I think is one of the most powerful and important works of 19th century British&American painting) and which was an important early step in the eventual abolition of chattel slavery by Britain.

I know the interests of the Academy Award winners are basically orthogonal to my own, but I really felt that this movie was both flawless and significant, and I would love to see it win All The Oscars. Gugu Mbatha-Raw's lead performance as Dido is compelling and note-perfect (and also she is super gorgeous which I'm sure is influencing my opinion, look, I am only human here). There are some lovely, painful, complicated character beats about love but also the limits of love. I had an unexpected moment of niftiness during the credits when I noticed the music was done by a woman - I mean, I must have seen movies with woman-composed scores before, I just could not remember ever noticing one (and so many of the movies I see seem to have scores from the same handful of people, Williams/Horner/Zimmer/etc. It turns out I have actually seen other movies scored by this very woman, Rachel Portman, who was the first female composer to win an Oscar, for Emma.) In fact I cannot help but wonder if part of what made this movie so very, very... how do I say this... targeted to my interests? Consisting entirely of scenes about stuff I cared about, without eyerolly bits? - was that it was written and directed by women (Misan Sagay and Amma Asante), and all of its female characters, major and minor, are treated fairly (although some are not good guys) and are doing something important in the story. I mean, the threat of sexual violence looms over a good chunk of the movie, after the two villainous brothers discuss raping slaves while looking at Dido, but in fact when there is finally an assault, it is "just" painful grabbing of her face and arm, which is upsetting (she's scared, and it's a total violation of their social mores) but wasn't stomach-turning for me to watch, and I feel like a male director might have been like "he should totally at least *try* to rape her", while a woman director was more likely to be like, "no, we want the audience to *enjoy* this movie, trust me they are already sitting there going "oh fuck don't get raped", *we do not actually have to show anything awful for them to "get it" about the way that some people view her*". Not that there aren't male writers etc who get it about rape threats, or that women necessarily do, but, I don't know, perhaps it's sexist of me but I cannot help but associate this kind of "getting it" with gendered experience.

Impassioned lawyers! Impassioned declarations! Passes the Bechdel test and then runs by again on its next lap, mocking the idea that "women have scenes with other women" is a challenging bar to hurdle! (Okay, I guess almost all of the conversations between women do have to do with men, but given that women's dependence on men for position in society is one of the key themes of this movie, a lot of the conversations about men feel like women trying to have conversations about their careers only they don't get to have careers.) My only regret is that I didn't see it weeks ago and recommend it then, unfortunately I think it's starting to leave theaters. Please please please costume-drama directors of the world, stop remaking the same few Jane Austen novels and do more of this mining of history for interesting real people to inspire your stories.

(And to think I was worried I wouldn't have enough things to request for Yuletide.)

Comments

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the review! Obviously sounds up my alley.