A costume drama with both beauty and brains, this story of a woman of English and African ancestry who occupied a problematic place in 18th-century English society has a real ring of truth, even if Misan Sagay's script avails itself of some extravagant artistic licence.
Director Asante impressed with her bleak 2007 debut A Way of Life, set among the beneficiary underclass in a Welsh city: the mid-18th-century world of Dido Elizabeth Belle (Mbatha-Raw) could hardly be more different.
The daughter of a naval captain and a slave woman, she is entrusted at age 9 to the care of her great-uncle, Lord Mansfield (Wilkinson), who happens to be the country's top judge. It would be unfair to spell out how these two lives intersect, but it is enough to say that the abolitionist cause was then in its infancy and the ground was shifting in England.
Real life seldom dances to the rhythms of screen storytelling and in the interests of dramatic neatness the film unabashedly resorts to elision, distortion, falsification and invention (Paula Byrne's well-researched history, published as a tie-in under the same title, is a satisfying and accessible read for anyone interested in the real story). A climactic legal case hugely oversimplifies real events and is every bit as contrived as it seems; meanwhile, the romantic subplot makes a stirring hero of a man of whom history tells us little.
But for all that, and even saddled with some lines of dialogue that are expository, anachronistic or studiously epigrammatic, the film works very well on its own terms. The manifold ironies of Belle's situation are well-handled: she is too noble to eat with the servants but too dark to eat at formal dinners; the fact that she is illegitimate (or "natural" as the euphemism of the day had it) counts for both more and less than her colour, depending on the context; and that's not even to mention the small matter of her gender.
