Race and status

Belle (12a)
Running time 95 minutes
Rating:***
When it comes to examining the moral fluff in its national navel, one might say that Britain can take some limited credit for being well to the fore in ’fessing up to its transgressions.
Belle, a BFI-Pinewood Studios film of the true story of an extraordinary girl, is some small kind of apology for a trade in people that was in the 18th century, an economic pillar of the growing British Empire.
The slave trade was managed through the so-called ‘Golden Triangle’, where British ships took trinkets, sold them to West African chiefs and Arab traders, in exchange for captured Africans, who were then taken to the plantations of the West Indies to work out, for the most part, a miserable, brutal and very short existence. The ships then brought the tobacco, sugar, and other luxuries back to Bristol and Liverpool which became the greatest ports in the world. It was a filthy trade, which even today, with different people, has not quite vanished.
Belle is the story of a mixed race girl, the daughter of a British Admiral, Sir John Lindsay, who was saved from a life of slavery by the man’s humanity. She was brought back to England and lived in the household of the sailor’s uncle, England’s Lord Chief Justice, William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield.
The film, starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dido Belle Lindsay, is an imagined glimpse into the life of such a girl living in a noble household in a country still largely unfamiliar with black faces.
Dido apparently was regarded as an ‘almost’ equal, being received, educated to a high degree, and making a position for herself in a British society uncomfortable with deviations from the rules.
The film is full of little reminders of how ‘different’ Dido was regarded. She could meet guests after meals, but not sit with them. She could accompany her lifelong companion, Lady Elizabeth Murray, to her coming out ball, but not ‘come out’ herself.
At the heart of the story is a racial turning point that only a generation later led to the abolition of slavery throughout the Empire.
Murray, as the highest legal officer in the land, was to determine the ‘Zong’ case, where a slave ship threw its ‘cargo’ of sick slaves overboard and then invented a story to claim insurance on its loss.
By exposing the fraud and saying it was a fundamentally wrong trade, Murray started the move to abolition.
The story of Dido, who later married happily, is encapsulated in an extraordinary painting, now hanging in Scone Palace in Scotland, which shows her and Lady Elizabeth, portrayed as equals, happy and joyful in youth and hope.
This is a fascinating film for those interested in history, but it also works – with a little narrative tweaking – as a romantic drama, where the main character is ably supported by great British character actors such as Tom Wilkinson, playing Murray, Miranda Richardson as a typically prejudiced noble lady, and Penelope Wilton as the two girls’ great aunt.
It may not have all the crashes, bangs, and special effects of your average Hollywood blockbuster, but the subject matter was – and is – earth-shaking.