Toronto International Film Festival: Amma Asante's biopic period drama, Belle

by Kyna Morgan

In one of my favorite cities, Toronto, for the international film festival this week, I was fortunate enough to procure a ticket for Amma Asante's latest film, Belle, a biopic period drama focusing on the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay.  Dido was the biracial daughter of Admiral Sir John Lindsay and a Black slave named Belle.  While not much is known of her life, Asante stated that what is known was included in the film.  Having last brought a film to Toronto about seven years ago, Asante found it difficult, along with her producer, Damian Jones, to find enough funding for the film, but both were tenacious!  (She told the crowd that Belle had less than a fifth of the budget of her previous film, A Way of Life (2004).)  In fact, when cast member Emily Watson described the early stages of her attachment to the film, she said it wasn't clear at the time whether the film would actually be made.  Every cast member present during the Q&A sang the praises of Asante as a writer and director.  She clearly had an inspiring vision for this film, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who portrayed Dido, spent the past seven years preparing for the role in various ways, even visiting Dido's home, Kenwood Estate on Hampstead Heath in England.  Mbatha-Raw fearlessly leads this star-studded cast with a fiercely inspired and beautifully tempered portrayal of Dido.

Dido was the niece of the Earl of Mansfield who was the highest judge in England at the time.  The film begins in 1769 when Dido is about eight years old and flashes forward to her late teen years or early 20's.  The story centers in part around her and her cousin Elizabeth's "coming out," as they were at a marriageable age, but also addresses Dido's sequestration from "proper" family gatherings and interactions given the broader social rejection of "Mulatto" persons at the time.  As a young woman, and after meeting an ambitious and egalitarian young man aspiring to be a lawyer ("John Davinier" played by Sam Reid), Dido began to understand the depths of the inequality she faced, even despite the generous allowance her deceased father left her which far outweighed anything her cousin would receive from her own father.  While she was deeply loved and respected in many ways within the family, she came to realize all was not right.  She was "free" of the need to marry, but realized that her family and the wider society considered it rather inappropriate for her to marry given not only her biracial heritage, but also her "illegitimate" birth out of wedlock.  Her family did come around to accepting the idea of marriage for Dido, though.  After accepting, then later rejecting an offer of engagement from a "gentleman" (rather than a "working man"), who decided to overlook her biracial heritage, she roundly rejected his patronizing offer in favor of standing on her own two feet.  Dido plunged herself into clandestinely helping John Davinier on a legal case of the Zong slave ship whose traders had drowned their "human cargo" in an attempt to collect insurance money.  Both Dido and John rejected the repulsive notion that human beings could have a value placed upon them, and in their working together and realizing they shared the same values and passions, fell deeply in love.  Dido was at odds with her uncle, the Earl of Mansfield, who was to rule in the case between the insurers and the Zong ship's slavetraders.   Listening to both sides, influenced by Dido's and Davinier's work (or perhaps realizing that he agreed with them all along), he ruled against the slavetraders and made clear that not only was this a case of fraud on their part, but also that the practice of selling human beings was wrong.  Their work and his ruling helped to move England forward in the movement to abolish slavery.

Asante gave a background on the characters at the end, indicating that Dido and John married and had sons, that her cousin Elizabeth also married, and that the painting of the two cousins (which we see in the film), is housed in Scotland. The image to the left is a detail of the actual painting of Dido and Elizabeth.

With extraordinary direction, stunning performances, incredibly powerful and insightful writing (by Misan Sagay), and a haunting score (by composer Rachel Portman), Belle is an outstanding film not only for its telling of the story of such an admirable person, but also for its all around brilliant production. 

The cast also includes: Penelope Wilton, Emily Watson, Miranda Richardson, Tom Wilkinson, Sarah Gadon, Tom Felton, and James Norton.

Belle is distributed by Fox Searchlight.  Its release date has been set for May 2, 2014.