Humans are complex beings. The movie “Belle” (director Amma Assante) explores human complexity, particularly as it manifests in everyday human relationships.
The movie is set in the late eighteenth century at the height of the transatlantic slave trade. Dido Elizabeth Belle (played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is the central character of the movie. She was born into slavery, but her father, Captain John Lindsay, was the nephew of the Lord Chief Justice William Murray (Earl of Mansfield). By this chance of fate, Dido escaped a life of slavery and was brought up instead in British high society – as part of the Lord Chief Justice’s household.
The movie explores what life may have been like for her. How did her origins affect her? How did she affect those around her? The complexities of class, ethnicity, racism, gender and idealism play out for this unusual household. These are the issues the movie explores.
Her benefactor, Mansfield, is most well-known for legal decisions that greatly influenced the eventual end of the slave trade.
How could Mansfield, steeped in the traditions, assumptions and societal structures which had produced the slave trade and sustained it for 200 years reach rulings that struck at its heart? What enabled him to set out in a direction at odds with a trade that had grown into a major national institution? Did his relationship with Dido – someone in all likelihood regarded as a beloved daughter – contribute to a revolution in thought and practice?
It is of course no accident that history failed to record the details of Dido’s life, thoughts and actions. Even had she not been the daughter of a slave, she lived at a time when women’s stories were rarely told.
Belle is concerned with the lives of individuals caught up in these events. It is well worth watching and is one of a number of dramatic accounts connected with the slave trade that have emerged in recent years following the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade in Great Britain. This story is told from the point of view of someone who lived through it in the most unusual circumstances.
Belle can be watched here.