I am having a difficult time corralling my thoughts about Montréal, ma belle, which I think reflects the multiple layers and cylinders that this film is firing on.
This drops five minutes into the film:
I thought: Okay, I see, I'm prepared for where this film will go.
I was not prepared.
A far-from-comprehensive thoughts dump with light spoilers after the cut:
The film, like the frankness demonstrated in that scene, is, among other things, far more explicit than I expected. There's a lot of escalation and compounding on several fronts as this film progresses, with how explicit the sex scenes becomes most surprising to me. The narrative continually pushes against each boundary of Feng Xia's compartmentalized life: she is a woman, a menopausal woman, an immigrant, Chinese, Quebecois, a wife, a mother, a queer woman, an adulterer. Feng Xia is all these things but often she is trying to be only one of these things at any given time, as if these hats she wears could be separated--but she's only one person and so these different sectors exert pressure on each other and, really, become sources of heightened danger as she explores repressed, buried parts of herself.
The onus to speak for herself, to speak French rather than rely on her Canadian-born daughter, Joy, to translate from Chinese for her, in conjunction with the hormonal changes brought on by menopause that has emotionally off tilt, open the door to a degree of self-consideration, freedom, and independence that Feng Xia has denied herself over her lifetime. Unpacking that sentence alone is so complicated: the complexity of Feng Xia's relationship with her daughter who is a second gen Canadian with Chinese-inflected but ultimately Canadian/Western values and culture and a socialized sense of women's value and independence (which is so interesting in later recontextualization when we learn that Feng Xia's husband really wanted a son and it snaps into focus the privileges and priorities given to their son that was not emphasized for their daughter, like making sure Dong Dong learns Chinese, whereas Joy has to basically apologize for not knowing Chinese, that she'll learn it some day) and how that gap divides mother and daughter; how Feng Xia's upbringing in China guided her to accept compulsory heterosexuality while knowing she is attracted to women; how speaking for herself using her own words, even accented (and I really wish I spoke French because I could tell and hear that Feng Xia's has an accent, I just don't know what it "sounds" like to a native speaker; the subtitles try to capture Feng Xia's at-times imperfect French grammar and syntax, but all of the nuance was lost to me), means Feng Xia has to verbalize her thoughts, which is just a step away from actualizing them.
Joy is a more minor role in the film and you can see that the presentation is already this complicated. This complexity of dynamics and interplay applies to Feng Xia in relation to her husband, in relation to her lover Lisa/Camille, in relation to her own desires. Feng Xia is navigating and handling personalities that take up more space than she does and we watch her attempting to expand into her own self in defiance of the quiet conformity and obedience that shaped how she moves through the world.
But because Feng Xia is so compartmentalized, she goes on this exploration illicitly. That illicit part lends the sense of endangerment to/from all the other sectors, that the whole house can come tumbling down at any moment.
Feng Xia's husband, Wang Jun, is on his own journey of long-suffering and continual disappointments of his delayed ambitions and this informs the tension that grows between Feng Xia and him as she begins to prioritize her own desires without expressing to him that that is what she is doing. He's grown to expect her full uncomplaining support of him and his needs (the wig Feng Xia wears when they have sex is presented without commentary, ever, but it's such a visual shorthand for Feng Xia giving Wang Jun what he wants) and receiving less of that attention and care adds to his frustrations in this foreign land that keeps denying him and eroding his dignity. External forces (the job market in his preferred field for an immigrant of his age with experience dating from too far back and an education that isn't valued) and internal forces (his marriage) are layering insult upon insult to his ego and dignity until it becomes unbearable. He can feel his wife pulling away but he's unequipped to stop it. He was not taught to consider his wife's needs--partly because she doesn't express them to him because she defers to him. I wasn't sure in what direction the confrontations would go when they occurred; some made me wince, some made my heart sink, all of them made me feel sad. One made me go, "Oh, I see, at last silence is the better part of valor."
As for Camille, I genuinely had no idea where Camille's story was going and could not have predicted what her background story turned out to be. I think there is deliberate misdirection about a key part (the figure from Camille's past) that is informed by how Camille is introduced--the terms of meeting with Feng Xia being "friends with benefits" and a bit of fun, that she clearly isn't alarmed or concerned that Feng Xia is married with children and has never been with a woman, with how Feng Xia blows her off at times and can be hot and cold re:engaging in intimacy, but can also be incomprehensively generous and attentive--and by the end I wasn't really sure what I thought Camille felt. There's a clear generational, cultural (the scene at the bar where Feng Xia has the most uncomfortable conversation with Camille's friends, yikes), experiential divide between Feng Xia and Camille, but the emotional one is the gap I felt most unsure about. I couldn't pinpoint the degree or depth either felt for each other, whether this was like two ships passing in the night having provided something important for one another or if either felt or wanted more. I think we see that both grew from the encounter with the other. But did Camille mean it when she said, "I love you"? I mean, I screamed when Feng Xia responded with . . . silence. (I wasn't surprised by the response, but I was like, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. You can't pull that on a reserved, conservative Chinese woman!)
I spent a lot of this film not knowing exactly what I was feeling, if I enjoyed it or not, but I can tell you a moment that stunned me:
Hot damn, can anything knock you off a high horse more effectively than an Asian mother's sharp words?
And here's the exact moment the film broke me:
As a farewell, Feng Xia gives Camille the photograph of herself at 18 years old with her best friend at the time, for whom Feng Xia had feelings. The gesture spoke of Feng Xia capitulating to the life of being a dutiful wife that she had built and confined herself to, that she was letting go of what-ifs and wistful thoughts and desires by relinquishing this photograph she'd held onto for all those years. It hit me so hard that I just cried.
I was surprised by how far Joan Chen went in this role. She moves through the registers so well but this asked a lot of her.
Did I like, did I not like it? I'm not sure. But it made me think, it engaged me, it made me pay attention. That it made me wrestle with weighing the price of decisions, not knowing what path was the most valid or worthwhile, knowing that potential loss of this or that hovered in every choice. Losing face, losing identity, losing children, losing social status and standing--that was all on the table if never explicitly stated.
It is a 2-hour film. When I started the film, I was like, that's a long runtime for an indie film, but it really did want to fit in a lot. And where things proceed from the film's end point--I couldn't say, but that something has shifted is the point. Feng Xia speaks. Her daughter told her at the beginning of the film that she would have to speak on her own behalf henceforth and Feng Xia finds her voice. What she'll say next, I don't know, but she's taken the first step.
(Low-key, however, I do not understand the hours of that convenience store. Did they keep it open at consistent times or was it sometimes whatever, whenever? It didn't seem like they employed anyone, so Feng Xia and Wang Jun were the ones running it exclusively? There were times when neither were there . . . ?)
Montréal, ma belle (Montréal, my beautiful) is a landmark in queer Asian diaspora cinema — the first theatrical feature to center a repressed Chinese lesbian protagonist.
Feng Xia, a 53-year-old Chinese immigrant and mother living in Montreal, has spent her life shaped by duty — to her family, her culture, and a loveless marriage. But when she meets Camille, a spirited young Québécoise, a long-buried desire is awakened. In the balmy and joyful Montreal summer, Feng Xia takes the radical step of choosing herself — embarking on a journey of forbidden love and long-overdue self-discovery. Her awakening becomes a profound reckoning with identity, exile, and the steep cost of liberation.
