Misan Sagay – Bitch Flicks

The Gaze of Objectification: Race, Gender, and Privilege in ‘Belle’

What does it mean in a young woman’s life to be constantly stared at and treated as “the Other”? ‘Belle,’ directed by Amma Asante and written by Misan Sagay, has a lush, gorgeous look from the costumes to the landscape, and throughout this new film we, too, are invited to “look,” and to understand that “the dominant white male gaze” is related to power in 18th-century England. An actual 1779 portrait currently hanging in Scone Palace, Scotland, credited to artist Johann Zoffany, is at the heart of the complex ‘Belle,’ as is the issue of race.

Movie poster for Belle — Movie poster for *Belle*

This guest post by Laura Shamas, PhD, previously appeared at Huffington Post and is cross-posted with permission.

What does it mean in a young woman’s life to be constantly stared at and treated as “the Other”? Belle, directed by Amma Asante and written by Misan Sagay, has a lush, gorgeous look from the costumes to the landscape, and throughout this new film we, too, are invited to “look,” and to understand that “the dominant white male gaze” is related to power in 18th-century England. An actual 1779 portrait currently hanging in Scone Palace, Scotland, credited to artist Johann Zoffany, is at the heart of the complex Belle, as is the issue of race.

The film is based on the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle (poignantly played by Mugu Mbatha-Raw), the illegitimate mixed race child of Captain Sir John Lindsay (Matthew Goode) and a woman named Maria Belle; her parents met on a Spanish slave ship. Dido’s mother dies before the story begins. The opening images of the film depict a child in a cloak in the shadows, a carriage ride on a rough road in England in the 1700’s, and then, the emergence of Captain Sir John Lindsay, who’s come to claim Belle as his daughter. But he’s unable to raise her, as he must sail away with the Royal Navy. He brings Dido to Kenwood House in Hampstead, the home of his aristocratic uncle, Lord Mansfield (sensitively portrayed by Tom Wilkinson), who is the Lord Chief Justice of England. He leaves Dido in the care of the Mansfields, but before Lindsay departs, he assures the girl that she is loved.

The pastoral Mansfield estate already has a young blonde charge on the premises: Lady Elizabeth Murray (Sarah Gadon plays the older Elizabeth), whose own father abandoned her while he’s moved on to Europe. The young Elizabeth and Dido become inseparable, and as “cousin-sisters” grow up doing everything together: frolicking in the grass, sharing a bedroom, studying music, letters, French, and eventually, the proper mores of society as taught by their watchful aunts, Lady Mansfield (Emily Watson) and Lady Mary Murray (Penelope Wilton). The Mansfields themselves are childless, and truly love their great-nieces. The two girls are raised on relatively equal footing in the home, with some notable exceptions. For example, when visitors come, Dido is not allowed to dine with them, due to being born out of wedlock. She is, however, able to meet and greet guests after dinner in the parlor.

The news of Captain Lindsay’s eventual death is delivered by letter; Dido becomes an heiress, afforded an sizable annuity, and therefore, is set financially for life; this is in direct contrast to Elizabeth, who has no dowry and must marry well, much as in a Jane Austen novel, in order to maintain the standards of her upbringing and lineage.

When male visitors do eventually arrive for dinner at Kenwood House, such as potential suitors James Ashford (Tom Felton) and his brother Oliver (James Norton), they stare and whisper in asides, sizing up “the mulatto”; director Asante aptly depicts the 18th-century concept of women as objects here. In a later carriage scene, Elizabeth directly expresses to Dido that choices facing them, as women, are depressingly limited; they are unable to work, and a good marriage seems to be their only hope for the future.

The motif of “looking” is emphasized further in other sequences in the film. There’s a very touching scene of Dido staring at herself in the mirror, and clawing, in agony, at her own skin, trying to come to terms with her own identity.

But when a painter is commissioned for a family portrait of the two girls, there are several separate shots of Dido holding a pose, gazed upon by not only the painter, but surreptitiously spied upon by another potential suitor, the budding abolitionist John Davinier (Sam Reid).

The film points to the multiple meanings of “gazing” at Dido: yes, due to her remarkable female beauty, as in the title, but also because she is “the Other” in 18th-century British society: aristocratic, educated, and biracial. In one scene, this is especially highlighted. Both Elizabeth and Dido are asked to play the piano for the Ashfords during their first visit to Kenwood House. Lady Ashford (Miranda Richardson) doubts that Dido will be able to play at all. But it is Dido who, between the two girls, is the more accomplished musician. In a later scene, the objectification of Dido in British society is more dire, as misogynistic James Ashford, who once called beautiful Dido “repulsive,” stares at her on a river bank, and then assaults her.

Mabel (Bethan Mary-James), the freed servant in the Mansfield’s London home, is another character connected to “looking.” Dido and Mabel stare at each other upon meeting, a recognition of their shared heritage — and yet their different positions in society. Later, in front of a mirror, Mabel shows Dido how to comb through her hair properly, starting with the ends first. Mabel tells Dido that a man first showed her how to do it.

Courtship becomes a major crucible in the film. Who will get a viable marriage proposal? Dido’s first proposal occurs under the watchful eye of a marble statue of Aphrodite in a bathing pose, seeming to imply it’s a love match. But later, the romance falls apart. Earlier, Lord Mansfield tried to entrust the keys of the house to Dido, offering her the honored place that her spinster Aunt Mary holds — a Hestia position as household caretaker. Hestia is the virginal domestic Greek goddess of the hearth who never leaves home. Worried about her future, Lord Mansfield implies that Dido won’t be able to make a suitable marriage match, due to her liminal societal position: her ethnicity combined with her aristocratic background. But his offer greatly disappoints Dido, and so we know that a romance is in her future; she chooses the way of Aphrodite, not Hestia.

Classism and racism are key parts of a secondary parallel plot involving Lord Mansfield, who must render a judgment on the horrible Zong massacre of 1781, about insurers and the deaths of 142 slaves on a cargo ship. Davinier becomes secretly allied with Dido here, trying to convince Lord Mansfield to rule against the ship’s crew, in favor of the insurers. Although there are several points in the film that seem anachronistic, as if twenty-century sensibilities are in motion instead of the more likely constraints of the time period, it is Dido’s agency in this later part of the film that seems most modern, and perhaps unlikely. Still, it gives Dido an important activist goal, and the two plotlines come together well in the end: Dido’s ability to decide her own future, the verdict in the Zong trial, and romance.

The famous Zoffany portrait of the girls is revealed in the end, highlighting the focus on its unusual qualities: a handsomely gowned, pearl-wearing young black woman touched by a well-dressed white woman, given equal center space at eye line level. In the film, Asante has shown us other pictures of the era, where Africans in paintings are given little space, infantilized, or enslaved, depicted as property. The impact of the independent spirit of Dido in the painting, and the equality in stature of the two girls in the portrait, is evocative and satisfying. Director Asante again reminds us of the motif of looking, gazing, as we ourselves finally stare at the family portrait that our heroine dutifully posed for at Kenwood. And instead of Dido merely seated, she’s smiling and in motion. Symbolically, and in contrast to Elizabeth, she is going somewhere. The theme of “looking,” or gazing upon from a position of privilege as related to objectification, is explored thoroughly in Belle. The film challenges us: what do you really see and why do you see it?

Laura Shamas is a writer, film consultant, and mythologist. Her newest book is Pop Mythology: Collected Essays. Read more at her website: LauraShamas.com.

Writer Misan Sagay Talks About Her Jane Austen-Like Heroine in ‘Belle’

Sagay discovered the subject of her Jane Austen-like drama a decade ago when she viewed the 18th century portrait by an unknown artist of a beautiful, biracial woman standing next to a blond, a woman in a pink brocade gown, in the galleries of Scone Palace in Scotland. The blond woman reaches out to the other woman who is slightly above here in the picture, and who wears a silk gown and an exotic headdress. She has a twinkle in her eye and exudes life and even has a sense of mischief. You cannot take your eyes off her.

This guest post by Paula Schwartz previously appeared at The Movie Blog and is cross-posted with permission.

Misan Sagay, the brilliant and passionate screenwriter of Belle, was in Manhattan recently to promote the film. Director Amma Asante and actors Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Belle), Miranda Richardson and Sam Reid also fielded questions from the press in separate rooms.

Sagay discovered the subject of her Jane Austen-like drama a decade ago when she viewed the 18^thcentury portrait by an unknown artist of a beautiful, biracial woman standing next to a blond, a woman in a pink brocade gown, in the galleries of Scone Palace in Scotland. The blond woman reaches out to the other woman who is slightly above here in the picture, and who wears a silk gown and an exotic headdress. She has a twinkle in her eye and exudes life and even has a sense of mischief. You cannot take your eyes off her.

Here are highlights of the interview with the screenwriter, who is also a medical doctor. Sagay speaks with a precise and clipped English accent, but she exudes warmth and passion, especially when she talks about the genesis and the message of Belle.

What was it like to see it fully realized from your script? Was it everything you envisioned?

I think it surpasses what I think that everything at every level more and more was brought to the thing and I think it’s a marvelous movie, so I’m very proud of it.

How did you first discover the story?

I was at university in Scotland. I was a medical student… It’s where William and Kate met. It’s a very traditional university, so quite often I would be the only black person around and so I went to visit Scone Palace and I was walking through and I came to a room and bang, there was a black woman in a painting, and I was stunned and intrigued and thrilled. She didn’t look like a servant or a slave. And I though, ‘Wow!’ and I looked at the caption and it just says, ‘The Lady Elizabeth Murray,’ so Dido is not known. The black woman is unknown. She’s completely silent and I remember carrying this image with me for years and when I went back to Scotland years later and I saw it again, the caption had been changed to ‘The Lady Elizabeth Murray and Dido, the Housekeeper’s Daughter.” I looked at that and I thought, ‘The Housekeeper’s daughter”? She doesn’t look like that, it doesn’t look right, and that was what was the jumping off point for me for the script. Who was she? Who was this woman who was gazing out of this portrait, not just with directness but with a mischief in her face, and who was pointing to her cheek as though, you know, “I’m what I am,” and I really wanted to tell her story.

Did you ever find out why they updated the portrait?

I think it’s almost a Teutonic shift that the older Mansfields were probably less accommodating to the view that this was blood and this was a relative and that the younger generation then are receptive to it. It may be it was updated because people began to ask, up until then no one had asked, and then people had begun to ask. Yes, I think it’s odd that was the story that was put there but that’s what they felt comfortable with I suppose.

It seems like that same story could happen today couldn’t it?

Absolutely. I lot of the research that I did was actually going to speak to people who had been adopted into very, very white environments and yes that story can play out today.

Dido was educated. She could write. There was no reason she hasn’t left a journal. She’s not left a word. This is a girl who lived very carefully about what she said and did. She may have been a Mansfield but she certainly wasn’t free. It was the same feeling I got when I spoke to people who lived in those environments, beloved and taken care of, but always slightly on eggshells.

What did you find out about her father?

That he was an Admiral… But what I found out, the two things that are really interesting, he must in some way he must have lived with Dido’s mother in the West Indies beforehand. And also when he came back to England that his relationship with Dido’s mother fell apart and he then married appropriately but appears never to have lived with that new woman. Whenever you’re doing research you always end up reading stories in the gaps between the stories and my romantic story is that they broke up that relationship and he never loved again. But he certainly never lived properly with his new proper wife, never had children with this new woman.

So you have archival material that no one else saw?

I don’t know that other people didn’t see it. I know that other people, who had seen it, did not – you look at the papers that were out that time – lots of them sort of fudged the issue of who she was. I think it was an issue who she was. I don’t want to say I was the only person, but I was prepared to name – and I wanted to name – what was there. I thought it was a lovely story.

How long did it take for you to develop this story?

I wrote the pitch in 2004 and I began to write the story then, and then the screenplay developed over (time). By 2010 it was over, so it was a long process. It’s a difficult script, many, many difficult decisions had to be taken in order to stay true to this central thing that it would be Belle’s story, so how do we do that? And also what is our aim? Belle herself did not marry until she was 32. It would be perfectly possible to write a long story of her as a life frustrated and a life from which she did not really fulfill herself until after everyone had died. I just didn’t want that for her! I wanted her loved! I wanted her to be beautiful! I wanted somebody to rip off her bodice and want to do so.

I wanted her to be beautiful and so that was why I took that decision that what might be the obvious story was not the way we would go; I would go with a love story.

I also wanted to make sure we looked at this cusp when she would really be discovering, really what being black meant. In the Arcadia of Kenwood and cocooned by childhood and wealth she would not have encountered that until she could encounter the point where she wanted to get married and that there is no place for her… The moment when you understand what your race actually means I think is a big one and I wanted that for her.

What other research did you do to make it factually true to the cultures and to the period?

This kind of thing needs massive research, especially when you’re writing about women. For example, the decision to put women and to have their relationships, which I’m always interested in, to write this sort of Jane Austen romance, made this research absolutely key, that finding the voices of women like this at this time. I was amazingly lucky to stumble on the diary, on the actually diary written by the Countess of Hardwick… much of what was the day to day life we see arise from looking at those women.

I was always looking for emotional truth. There weren’t video camera. We don’t know what actually went on. But it is true in that the Zong case happened. She was in his house. He had to deal with it, so there was a huge amount of that sort of research. (Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice of England, handed down a decision in this case, which involved the massacre of slaves, and which became instrumental in the abolition of slavery. He also raised Dido as though she were his daughter.)

There are so many parallels with Belle’s story and even with stories of women of color today. What is the message you would like to get out?

It’s terribly important that this is a voice of black women, that’s what this film is. The main thing for me is this issue about your worth.

There are so many messages, and a lot of it is subliminal but from a very young age what are you worth, compared to other people? And I think it was something Belle had to encounter. What was she worth? She was worth loving but she wasn’t worth eating with.

At the moment where Belle herself had to say, you know what? I’m worth me. I’m worth loving and I can have it. And I can be myself and I think that is the message and I think at the end of the day when every screening I’ve attended the women will stand up and clap because the moment when she says that is a great moment for all of us. I think that it’s a terribly empowering moment and I think that that was the aim.

This movie is so unique, just by the mere fact that both the writer and director are black and female. What type of relationship do you guys have?

I was unwell and I left the project. In 2010 Amma came on as director and she – I believe and feel that at the moment where I maybe had flagged, because it had been seven years, but the script was there, the subject was there, everything was there, that Amma was able to take the baton and run with it, and run for her life with it and she has done an extraordinary, extraordinary job. She’s been true to absolutely everything that was the aim from the beginning.

I assume you’re talking a bit about the controversy. [There was a Writers Guild of America decision that credited Misan Sagay as the Belle screenwriter.] Whenever you see tough opinionated women, you will see tough opinions. And I think that’s what we have here, but I have nothing but admiration and respect for what she’s done as a director, and I think it’s a marvelous movie, marvelous.

What’s next for you?

I’m doing a historical story set in Burma during the Second World War. We always think that it’s white people who have fought that battle, which is called the Forgotten War, but in fact it was won by 300,000 black Africans that were taken over there as part of the British Empire and it was a war that Britain was losing and they brought the Africans and they fought their way through the jungle and helped. Without them the War in the East would not have been won but no one’s told their story.

You’re also a medical doctor. How does that inform your writing?

I think it informs my writing because one of the things you that you look for – maybe you all know this without being a doctor – you’re looking for truth. You look at what’s in front of you and you say what is the emotional truth here?

It’s not that different a process for me. I love doing both things. There’s an immediacy to medicine which there isn’t in this. It can take years looking for a story but to me they’re not that different.

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

‘Belle’: A Costume Drama Like and Unlike the Others

People of color are often omitted from historical dramas (except to play slaves or servants), with the rationale that it’s not “realistic” to have them in the cast. We can see through this excuse in historical dramas in which casting people of color would match the story being told, but white people still have the biggest roles in–and sometimes even make up the entire cast of–the film, as in the recently released ‘Noah.’ Historical “realism” is not always what we think it is: literature and visual art through the ages confirm that people of color who weren’t slaves, like Alexandre Dumas the author of ‘The Three Musketeers,’ have been in Europe for as long as people have lived there. We need to see more of their stories onscreen.

People of color are often omitted from historical dramas (except to play slaves or servants) with the rationale that it’s not “realistic” to have them in the cast. We can see through this excuse in the historical dramas in which casting people of color would match the story being told, but white people still have the biggest roles in–and sometimes even make up the entire cast of–the film, as in the recently released Noah. Historical “realism” is also not always what we think it is: literature and visual art through the ages confirm that people of color who weren’t slaves, like Alexandre Dumas the author of The Three Musketeers, have been in Europe for as long as people have lived there. We need to see more of their stories onscreen.

Director Amma Asante, in her second feature, Belle tells the based-on-fact story (the script is by Misan Sagay) of a young biracial girl, whose Royal Navy Admiral father (Matthew Goode) takes her to the family estate just outside of London, so his great-uncle’s family and servants can raise her in late-18th-century, upper-class luxury her father says is “due to her.”

The girl, Dido, grows into a beautiful young woman (Gugu Mbatha-Raw in a star-making turn), wearing the finest dresses, often the same cut (with the outrageously low necklines and the upward thrust of breasts typical of the period–like a Maxim cover gone out of control) but in a different shade from those of her blonde, white cousin and companion Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon). Dido carries her father’s last name, and, when he dies, inherits a £2,000 annuity which, as Elizabeth points out, makes her an heiress. But Dido is not allowed to eat dinner with the family–or the servants, because, as her great-uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson) tells her, neither situation would be “correct” for a woman of her color and social standing.

Dido’s isolation increases when her aunts take the initiative in finding a rich husband for her cousin who, because her father has remarried, has no dowry. Lord Mansfield hands the house keys to Dido and explains that since no gentleman will marry her (because of the color of her skin) and because of her social standing she cannot marry a man who isn’t a gentleman, she can soon replace her “spinster” Aunt Mary (Penelope Wilton) as the caretaker of the house.

During the family’s stay in London, Dido does attract suitors, for her beauty, charm and for her money. Fans of Jane Austen may see some parallels with her work, especially in Dido’s initial fraught interactions with John (Sam Reid), the vicar’s abolitionist son. Belle fails to give the same sense, as the best adaptations of Austen do (like 1995’s Persuasion) of the death grip manners and custom combined with the mores and opinions of their families and social circle had on women, especially young women, at that time (and the film takes place some decades before the works of Austen do). The film pays little attention to the necessity of a young man and a young woman of courting age to always have a chaperone present, a tradition that survives today in some strict religious communities in which the prospective bride and groom spend hardly any time alone together before they are married.

We see the reason for chaperones when Dido is alone with the loathsome older brother of the penniless gentleman who wishes to marry her. The brother manhandles her as he tells her how disgusting he finds her, and then, out of the camera’s range, seems to sexually assault her. This scene is the only part of the film that, at that time of strict sex segregation among unmarried, unrelated gentry, shows how privileged, white men felt free to sexually prey on women of color. Although the film makes clear that Dido’s father loved her mother, the implications of his meeting her on a Spanish slave ship are disturbing: the mother is never called a slave, so we can infer Dido’s father never owned her (unlike Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, the mother of his children who were born into slavery) but the relationship (while not rape, as it would be between a slave and owner no matter how much one “loved” the other) would still be an abuse of power if Dido’s mother worked for her father as a paid servant, as Mabel (Bethan Mary-James), the Black maid at the family’s London house, does.

The customs and mores of the present day always corrupt the “realism” of costume dramas: the well-scrubbed faces and bodies of the actors belying the fact that daily bathing is a relatively recent innovation, their clothes, in the days before dry-cleaning are spotless (in very early silent films we see stained clothes–over a hundred years after the events of Belle take place–were the norm), their accents in 18th century England are an anachronism. We suspend our disbelief to ooh and ahh over the pretty dresses, grand mansions and drawing room antics.

The problem with Belle is: we have to suspend our disbelief about the rampant racism, and to some degree the sexism (Dido, at one point, is the only woman in a court full of men and not one of them tries to throw her out) of the time as well. We see plenty of racist sentiment directed toward Dido (especially from Miranda Richardson, who plays the gossipy, sharp-tongued mother of Dido’s gentleman suitor), but the “good” people like Dido’s great-uncle and John end up espousing beliefs about racial equality very much like those the “good” white people of today might. Even though one character wrote a court decision that (spoiler alert) laid the framework for the eventual abolition of slavery in England, and the other (spoiler alert) married a Black woman, giving these 18th century characters (especially those based on real people who lived at the time) the mindset of the 21st century has the effect, as in Downton Abbey and to a lesser degree in Mad Men, of downplaying the racism of the past, the legacy of which we still see in the present.

Dido_ElizabethPortrait — The real Dido and Elizabeth

Americans don’t have to go back nearly 250 years and over an ocean to find overt racism about the “mixing” of the races from “good” white people. Abraham Lincoln, who signed the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation about 80 years after the events of the film take place, espoused racist beliefs in historical documents. Film and television producers avoided showing white and Black people together in any relationship other than as master and servant (even on talk shows) well into the 1960s. In the 1970s, when my family lived next door to an interracial couple, the children in the neighborhood called their son and daughter “zebras.”

The second of Dido’s suitors, John, is radically forward-thinking for the time. Much religious rhetoric in those days supported slavery, the way a lot of religious rhetoric today supports homophobia, so John would have had to be something of an apostate too: an unusual position for the son of a clergyman. He also would have been considered a crank and an outcast (like many forward-thinking people throughout history) in most social circles of the time. Instead, he suffers from Perfect Man Syndrome, a disease that also afflicts the romantic leads in Short Term 12 and the upcoming releases Obvious Child and Dear White People: men who are so ceaselessly caring, who never say the wrong thing no matter how aggrieved they are, that they might as well sprout wings and fly into the clouds as angels. Sam Reid’s relative lack of skill as an actor doesn’t help: I had to suppress a giggle when he shouts, “I love her,” in a scene that isn’t supposed to be humorous. The flawless Mbatha-Raw, in particular, shows him up, as does the presence of Wilkinson, Richardson, Wilton and Emily Watson (who plays Wilkinson’s wife) in the film who all give the type of serviceable performances that will neither diminish nor enhance their reputations as great actors. The film score by Rachel Portman (one of the few women who regularly composes music for movies) is also uninspired: cuing the audience to feel emotions the film doesn’t quite earn.

That said, Belle has a great lead performance from a Black actress in a Black woman director’s film of a Black woman’s script about a Black woman in European history (who wasn’t a slave): an opportunity that doesn’t come very often for audiences, so you shouldn’t miss it. If the long line for the women’s restroom after the film is any indication (women are the main audience for costume dramas in film and on TV) Belle will probably be a big art house success. Still, we see glimmers of a better, deeper movie in too few moments of Belle: in Dido’s own initial snobbishness, the trappings of which have left her in a lonely, untenable position. Later, we see her two identities, as an upper class woman and a Black woman, at odds with each other, captured most poignantly when Dido is asked to sit for a family portrait. At first we don’t understand why she’s upset at the request, until she points out that in the paintings on the walls of the mansion, Black people are always positioned at the feet of white people (as pet dogs, cats and birds were often painted with children at the time: in the otherwise excellent A Royal Affair–which takes place during the same general period–a Black child is also portrayed as a “pet” for the white upper class). At the end of the movie the director unveils the real portrait that inspired the film and in the original Dido’s face we see an expression hinting at the more complex and nuanced conduit to the past Belle might have been.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFi8YCxq2VU”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.