Written and Directed by Marion Hill
Starring Idella Johnson, Hannah Pepper-Cunningham, Lucien Guignard
Runtime: 1 hour 33 minutes

by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

There are some romantic dramas that are loud. Ones that burst at the seams, trying to get out. Absolute abandonment personified on film with characters yelling their emotions and feelings at each other. Those feelings are often stated naked in dialogue or sometimes read on actors’ faces with a simple look. Relationships on screen are hard to portray in a truthful way, one that feels real and not like it’s a film. Often, loud is the best way to get attention and to retain it–and sometimes it’s because it’s true. But quiet is also true.

Ma Belle, My Beauty is a quiet film. It’s certainly the type of soft, emotionally complicated film that should be at Sundance. It’s also a film that I’ve circled around my feelings on since I watched it. It’s about three people who used to be in a polyamours relationship. It’s been a while, though, since Lane (Hannah Pepper-Cunningham) left their relationship to do her own thing. In the time since, Bertie (Idella Johnson) and Fred (Lucien Guignard) have gotten married and moved to Fred’s old family house in the south of France. When Fred invites Lane back into their lives, it brings back old feelings that Bertie thought she’d shoved far away from her current relationship.

Writer and director Marion Hill does a masterful job at doling out the historical context as we need it, while providing the emotional backbone from jump. There’s no doubt from the moment Lane comes to the house that there was something deep between the two women, but that it ended in a way Bertie finds unforgivable.

Something that I really loved was Fred and Lane’s relationship. That they were in a polyamorous relationship, but were never sexual with each other, is an interesting dynamic. Rather than being a triangle, their relationship with Bertie was very much a line with three points. The scene of them preparing dinner together is a dream, and the two actors have a lot of nice chemistry with each other that makes the relationship we never actually see feel so real.

The heart of the story, though, is the women. Their relationship is a ghost that haunts them, even in a totally new location to where it began. The past, the present, and the future are all weaved nicely into how Bertie perceives Lane’s staying at the house. There’s hurt involved in all three. From how they ended things, to Lane fucking another girl in her house, to how they don’t have a future because of Lane’s… whole thing. It's a deeply emotional film, with raw sexuality whenever it serves the story. (I’ll never be mad at strap-on sex in media!)

However, one of the things I initially struggled with after watching the film was that seemed too fit nicely into the narrative that bisexual women tend to end up with men. Especially in a film with openly polyamorous characters, that seemed a bit out of place for this movie. But as I thought more about the actual facets of the choices made in the film, not just the end result, I came to actually appreciate the ending of the film. Love it, even.

Because it’s not about Bertie choosing to be with Fred over Lane. Fred’s not in consideration when the women have their last conversation, not really. Instead, it’s actively about Bertie and Lane’s relationship. The heavy history of them thick in the air, doomed to repeat itself. The story isn’t that a bisexual woman chooses a man, it’s that she chooses herself. She knows the pain that Lane can cause her–she’s done it before–and she decides that it’s just not worth it. Her husband is the afterthought of afterthoughts.

Ma Belle, My Beauty is a true enough story. It’s someone’s truth. Multiple someones. Maybe all the facts don’t line up properly, but the emotional core of it exists in many relationships around the world. Those quiet relationships that don’t end with a bang, but end with silence and a train ride far, far away.