Amma Asante’s film is inspired by a painting showing a bi-racial girl with a white woman. Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw ) is of mixed race and is raised with her half cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray (Sarah Gadon). She is the daughter of Captain John Lindsay and an African Maria Belle. She is brought up in Kenwood House by Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson) who was famous for hearing the “Zong” ship court case in which the human “cargo” of slaves was murdered by being thrown overboard. Lady Mary Murray (Penelope Wilton) is disappointed in love. John Davis plays a clergyman’s son and he is idealistic about ending the slave trade. Dido and Davis struggle for human rights and Mansfield gives his ruling…
Review
This of course is a story about racial and gender identity, about slavery, class, love, and marriage. It’s a thinking person’s costume drama for Jane Austen fans. It’s about the buttoned-up snobberies barely contained. We’ve seen the obscene face of slavery in 12 Years a Slave and now Belle takes us to the rococo drawing rooms where words and gestures are as if prized on an elegant tight rope woven with gilt. We wait for the arrogant characters to fall off and land on their backsides. Belle does not avoid chocolate box sentimentality, as when Mansfield gives his judgement against the Zong slavers, it looks too much like ‘finding your dreams’ tearfulness, it’s epiphanic aspect emphasized by coinciding with Belle and Davis’ declaration of love. I recall British TV’s Comic Strip which showed Rik Mayall as a judge tearfully throwing his hammer away at a happy ending and this is similar, though Tom Wilkinson does resist the public sob. Wilkinson does a good job of consigning Mansfield’s past idealism to the self serving pragmatism that coincides with the requirements of influence and power. John Davis’ is on hand with the earnest anti-racist liberalism that we’re all familiar with now but looks anachronistic in the 18th century which boasted abolitionists of the slave trade, not of slavery. Gugu Mbatha-Raw brings a feisty rebelliousness which is all the more effective for being well channelled into the elegant riposte, especially as she must negotiate the traps of proposed marriage to horrible suitors. Absorbing.