Montreal, My Beautiful Review (BFI Flare 2026)
Arriving at this year’s BFI Flare after an acclaimed launch in its home country of Canada, Montreal, My Beautiful has attracted more than enough word of mouth to make it one of the festival’s hottest tickets. Not surprisingly, when you consider this slow-burning romance stars a luminous Joan Chen facing numerous obstacles – emotional, cultural and sexual.
In her mid-50s, Feng Xia (Chen) has been married for years to Jun (John Xu) and, as well as looking after their two children, she works in their Montreal convenience store. It’s a life of duty, obedience and very little in the way of choices, but the arrival of the menopause gives her the impetus to do something different, and she enrols for French classes. A conversation with a fellow student, an openly queer young Cuban, awakens memories of her unspoken love for a childhood friend, and she decides to sign up for a gay dating site. She soon meets a much younger Quebecoise, Camille (Charlotte Aubin), and they begin an affair which starts awkwardly and progresses gradually. There’s a lot standing in their way.
Director Xiaodan He has described Montreal, My Beautiful as her love letter to her adopted city, and it shows in the pretty coffee shops, boutique stores and little parks. It’s romantic in itself, simultaneously providing a perfect setting and a stark contrast to the often turbulent relationship between the two women. It’s never short on passion, but it’s Feng Xia who has the most to lose, as her love for Camille goes against Chinese tradition, threatening her way of life and plunging her into an uncertain future. She’s in a marriage where Jun makes all the decisions, and she has no choice but to defer to him, so having a mind of her own is new – and frightening – territory. And when Jun starts to suspect she is seeing somebody else, everything she’s lived for is at stake.
While the focus is very much on Chen’s dilemma, her humdrum marriage holds just as much fascination as her affair with Camille, and that’s down to the portrayal of her husband. It would have been all too easy to paint him as the villain – and there are moments when he fits the mould – but for most of the time, he cuts a literally pathetic figure. He’s just as trapped by tradition as his wife, but in a different way, one that drives him to attend numerous fruitless interviews in the hope of bringing home more money and giving his family a better life. Your sympathy for him runs thin when he tells her she’s “like a dead fish” in bed, but for most of the time, he’s pitiful.
It almost goes without saying that Chen is exquisite in this poetic and powerful love story, elevating all her scenes with ease in a performance that’s as restrained as her character in last year’s The Wedding Banquet is tactless. Your heart aches for her to find a life that’s genuinely her own instead of living through others. And, in a mini master stroke, Xiaodan He leaves it to us to decide the outcome. Which is yet another reason to catch Montreal, My Beautiful. Not that you needed more ……
★★★★
Screening at BFI Flare on March 24th and 26th (UK release date to be confirmed) / Joan Chen, Charlotte Aubin, Pei Yao Xu, John Xu, Anzhe Angelo Zhang / Dir: Xiaodan He
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