Belle - a film review Catherine Johnson

Sarah Gadon as Elizabeth and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dido

This film Belle, is remarkable for many reasons, it's directed by a black woman (and ex Grange Hill-er Amma Asante) it's historical and there is a woman of colour in the lead wearing what can only be described as Utterly Fabulous Frocks. These are the frocks of my nine year old dreams, the frocks that I longed to wear and now at last they're here larger than life and completely beautiful (as are the female leads by the way).

It uses the life of Belle as the starting point for a froth of romance and politics that entwines the case of the slave ship Zong  (a insurance scam in which ill slaves were drowned at sea rather than sold at a loss) with Belle's unusual social standing just as racism was being properly and fully industrialised. How fantastic to see another facet of British history bought to the screen in a stylish and entertaining manner. 

I'm not going to give you all the history, safe to say Dido Belle was bought up as a lady even though she was illegitimate and mixed race. She did marry, but her husband was not a preachers firebrand campaigning lawyer but a steward and they lived in Mayfair, were married at St George's that lovely church just by Hanover Square and she was buried in the burial ground behind Connaught Square.

Did I mention the clothes? i think I did, and I had been looking forward to this film for a very long time. My mother went to see it and loved it and she has good taste I took my best friend, she wept buckets while I myself did manage a moist eye.

I think the team did an excellent job with setting and costume, no mean feat for a British (read low budget) feature. The performances by the female leads and the older generation - Miranda Richardson, Tom Wilkinson and Penelope Wilton were all brilliant, sadly I found the love interest and the evil suitor a little lacking.

It was not the art house smash that is 12 Years a Slave but I would recommend it most wholeheartedly. Belle combines rock solid storytelling and a very handsome look at class and race constraints in 18th century Britain. Let's hope this is the first of many such films that explore all our history. There are so many stories that are waiting for this sort of treatment.

Of course if you'd like to explore this period in a book I can offer you Sawbones! Which by the way won the Young Quills 12+ best historical fiction award earlier this week. And I shall leave you with the portrait of Dido and her cousin Elizabeth which inspired the film.

Dido Belle and Elizabeth Murray 1779. Attributed to Zoffany

Catherine.

SLAVERY IN THE DRAWING ROOM – Elizabeth Fremantle

One thing retelling history can do is remind us of the horrors of the past in the hope that they will not be  repeated. Narratives like Toni Morrison's harrowing novel Beloved and Steve McQueen's Oscar winning film Twelve Years a Slave have served to remind us of the story of slavery from an insider perspective, bringing the cruelty home to us in a powerful and uncomfortably intimate way – they give a voice to the victims. But it has been easy for us English to respond from a distance, thinking of it as something essentially that happened elsewhere. It is true there has been much post-colonial discourse on the slave trade, with commentary on why it is never mentioned in Jane Austen; and novels like Heart of Darkness demonstrated anxiety about the destruction of Africa and its people more than a hundred years ago, but now we are beginning to see narratives that put slavery right into the gentile drawing rooms of Georgian England.


Imogen Roberston's latest novel Theft of Life describes a multi-cultural eighteenth century London, its hands drenched, up to the elbows, in blood. In her notes she says, 'Our institutions, our monuments and our culture are all stained and coloured by slavery, and it's not talked about enough,' and what her novel seeks to do, aside from entertain, is open that conversation in an unexpected arena: that of crime fiction. Drawing on stories of Oludah Equiano and Frances Glass she shapes her narrative around the atrocities of slavery, allowing us to see, with each  teaspoon of sugar, that they existed as much in Europe as they did across the Atlantic. She gives her protagonists, whether black or white, a voice and a space to express themselves, showing them all as equally part of the fabric of society even if their status was often unequal. Within Robertson's gripping novel, stories emerge of a bookseller who was once a slave, as was a teacher in the art of swordsmanship; the mixed-race children of slave owners and their female slaves, carry the weight of a past that asks questions about how those, surely one-sided, relationships.

One such story is Belle, which tells of the mixed-race daughter of a naval Admiral and a slave. She was gathered into her aristocratic English family and raised by her grandfather, Lord Mansfield a man who had a hand in the abolition of slavery. Based on a true story, the film addresses issues of race – Belle though well loved is not quite treated as equal to her white siblings – from an oblique angle, placing ideas about 'otherness' at the heart of what is essentially a traditional tale of romance, only here the obstacle to love, so necessary to the genre, is the heroine's skin colour. The impact of the young woman being named Belle highlights both the similarities of this story with that of Beauty and the Beast whose simpering Disney protagonist bears the same name, placing it at the heart of its genre whilst also commenting upon the story of 'otherness' it has to tell. People may want to judge films with a romantic imperative such as this as trivialising an issue that deserves more weight but it is by siting those narratives into genre fictions, be they crime or romance, that they inform a wider audience and that can only be a good thing.


Theft of Life is published by Headline and is out in hardback and ebook

Belle is out in cinemas nationwide from 13th June

Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of Tudor fictions Queen's Gambit and Sisters of Treason.

Visit her website for information on those and future projects – elizabethfremantle.com