Montréal, ma belle: Joan Chen’s Rising Star Role

Joan Chen played a series of iconic, beautiful women in the ’80s and ’90s, from Wan Jung in the Oscar-winning film The Last Emperor to Josie Packard in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

Now in her 60s, the actress has been showing off her range in films like Dìdi, The Wedding Banquet and most recently, Montréal, Ma Belle. In the film, Chen plays Feng Xia, a 53-year-old Chinese immigrant and mother who falls in love with a young Québécoise.

Today on Commotion, culture critics Hoai-Tran Bui and Thomas Leblanc join guest host Radheyan Simonpillai to talk about Joan’s leading performance in Montréal, Ma Belle, and the slow-burn queer romance at the film’s centre.

We’ve included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Radheyan: Talk to me about her performance in this movie.

Hoai-Tran: I think she’s terrific in Montréal, Ma Belle…. This is her first leading role in a while, and it’s so wonderful to see her deliver the kind of complex, quietly suffering performance that she’s done on mostly the sidelines in her recent roles, and do it in the spotlight. She gets to be complicated, turmoiled and sexy. I don’t know if this is her first nude performance, or at least in a while, but she looks great. It’s a really beautiful performance and really multi-layered.

Radheyan: I was blown away by this performance. Joan Chen, here, is working with Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Xiaodan He, and this is the second feature from Xiaodan He that she has written and directed. Thomas, you were actually surprised when you watched this film. What was surprising for you?

Thomas: Quebec cinema is a very vibrant national cinema. This film was shot in Montreal, produced in Montreal, so I would say it’s a Quebec film. But it’s also nothing like I’ve ever seen in a Quebec film…. It is a queer immigrant love story where the protagonist is not a young woman discovering her queerness in her 20s. She’s a mother, she is in her 50s. There are so many interesting details about her relationship to the place where she is, Montreal, as a first-generation Chinese immigrant.

Also, she seemed to me extremely believable. She plays the wife of a depanneur owner…. And most depanneurs in Montreal are owned by Chinese couples like this one. So to see the reality of a first-generation Chinese immigrant owning a depanneur in Montreal … be told, and to have a very important queer element, it’s not something I’ve ever seen. And then you get into the relationship with the daughter, who’s second generation, goes to school in Montreal, has a very thick Québécois accent.… As a Québécois, I’m aware of these dynamics but I haven’t seen them on the screen that often….

WATCH | Official trailer for Montréal, ma belle:

One thing that’s shown in the movie is the reality of the French language classes that are government-funded for new immigrants. She enrolls in one of them. I’ve never seen this on screen in a fiction film, and it was quite beautiful to see it portrayed almost as a sort of documentary scene with the other participants — I believe a lot of non-actors, also….

Radheyan: That opens the door to this romance, right? … Hoai-Tran, can you jump in on … this relationship and how it evolves over time, and throughout the pace of this movie?

Hoai-Tran: Yeah. This movie is definitely a slow burn, but I think that the pacing perfectly complements the story that the film is trying to tell. It’s a story of a woman slowly coming to terms with her own sexuality later in life, which she can’t even articulate or even acknowledge at first. And there’s a good John Green quote, “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” And I think that’s the kind of feeling that Montréal, Ma Belle really captures.

You can listen to the full discussion from today’s show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jane van Koeverden.