Directed by Xiaodan He | French-language | ★★★★★
There are films that entertain, and then there are films that find you — that slip past every wall you have carefully built and press a hand gently against the part of you had forgotten was still tender. Montréal, Ma Belle is the second kind. I left the theatre unable to speak for several minutes. I am not sure I fully regret it.
Director Xiaodan He has made something achingly rare: a love story that refuses to reduce its characters to their desire. This is not a film about a lesbian affair. It is a film about two women standing at the edge of themselves, looking down, and choosing — in utterly different ways — whether or not to jump.
The Weight of a Woman Who Has Lived for Others
Joan Chen’s performance as Feng Xia may be the finest work of her already luminous career. At 53, Feng Xia has built a life that from the outside resembles contentment: a steady marriage to Wang Jun (a quietly devastating John Xu, who plays a good man with the full tragic complexity that phrase deserves), a daughter Joy (Pei Yao Xu, heartbreaking in her obliviousness), a home in a Montreal she has inhabited but never quite entered.
Chen plays Feng Xia as a woman who has been so thoroughly shaped by duty — by filial piety, by the immigrant’s silent compact to not take up too much space, by thirty years of managing her husband’s dignity along with her own — that she has misplaced the ability to want things for herself. She does not know she is grieving. That is the most devastating part. She has learned to experience her own absence as a form of virtue.
When He’s camera finds Feng Xia alone — washing a teacup, standing at a window above the St. Lawrence — Chen performs entire interior lives without a single word. Her stillness is not peace. It is the stillness of someone who learned very long ago that movement could cost too much.
The Girl Who Moves Like She Has Nothing to Lose
Charlotte Aubin’s Camille arrives into this silence like a window thrown open in a room that has been sealed for years. She is younger, Québécoise, frankly queer, unencumbered by the architecture of obligation that Feng Xia has spent decades constructing. Aubin plays her not as a fantasy or a catalyst, but as a fully realized person with her own anxieties, her own hunger — and crucially, her own capacity for tenderness that surprises even herself.
What Aubin accomplishes is astonishing in its subtlety. Camille is not rescuing Feng Xia. She is not a manic pixie dreamgirl delivered by the plot to awaken an older woman’s dormant self. She is someone who genuinely sees Feng Xia — not the duty, not the immigrant, not the wife — and is disarmed by what she finds there. The gap in their ages becomes not a complication but a kind of language. They are translating each other across the distance of entirely different ways of having been a woman in the world.
Their scenes together are almost unbearably intimate. He stages their connection through small moments: fingers near but not quite touching over a shared map, laughter that stops too suddenly because it has felt too good, the silence after an almost-confession that neither of them is ready to name. When the tenderness finally breaks open between them, it does not feel transgressive. It feels — and this is the word that kept surfacing in me — true.
The City as Witness
He uses Montreal with the eye of someone who loves a city precisely for its contradictions. The French cobblestones of the Plateau, the bilingual tumble of the Marché Jean-Talon, the frozen stillness of the St. Lawrence in winter — the city becomes a third character, a place where identities are always in negotiation, where the question of who are you here never fully resolves. For Feng Xia, the city has always been slightly foreign. Through Camille’s eyes, it becomes, tentatively, possible to belong to it.
What Is Left Behind and What Is Found
The film does not offer easy resolutions, and I am grateful. Wang Jun is not a villain. Alice (Émile Leclerc Côté), Camille’s world, is not an obstacle. He is too honest a filmmaker to arrange her characters into heroes and obstructions. What happens to Feng Xia’s marriage, to her sense of herself as a Chinese woman, as a mother, as a person who made promises — all of it is held with extraordinary care. The film asks what it costs a woman to discover herself at 53, and it does not pretend the cost is small. It is immense. And He insists the discovery is worth grieving and worth celebrating simultaneously.
There is a scene near the end — I will not describe it — in which Feng Xia does something very small and very irreversible. Joan Chen plays it in close-up, and I watched a woman’s entire life reorganize itself behind her eyes. I have thought about that moment every day since I saw this film. I expect I will continue to.
Montréal, Ma Belle is a film about what happens when a woman who has always lived for the future — her children’s future, her husband’s future, her family’s future in a new country — suddenly, unexpectedly, begins to live in the present tense. It is about the terror and the grace of being truly seen. It is about how desire, long buried, does not die — it only waits, patient as the river, for the right season.
Go see it. Then sit quietly for a while afterward. You may need to.
In theaters, starting February the 13th 2026.
Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A9_uxkwWng and Video on Vimeo
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