Montreal, My Beautiful: Joan Chen Luminous (As Usual) Is a Hit in Quebecois Film

By Liz Braun

Rating: B

The award-winning Montreal, My Beautiful is a quiet but moving tale about identity. It is also a love letter to the vibrant Canadian city.

Joan Chen stars here as Feng Xia, a middle-aged housewife living in Montreal with her husband (John Xu), both Chinese immigrants. They have a daughter and a son, and they run a convenience store.

Read our interview with Joan Chen

The story opens with Feng Xia — her name means Phoenix — visiting a gynaecologist and asking intimate questions about menopause; her teenage daughter (Pei Yao Xu) translates for her.

It’s a compact, telling scene that outlines where our central figure is in life: a woman of a certain age, trapped between two cultures, dependent upon others and defined by her role — wife, mother — in other people’s lives.

After enrolling in a French language class, our sheltered Feng Xia learns about dating apps from one of her classmates (Zion-Luna Ribeaux Valdès), a gay man who explains he emigrated to Montreal for love.

She asks him questions about his orientation and the judgement of others; there’s a flashback to her own youth and other hints in the story that she is attracted to women.

Soon enough she meets a woman named Camille (Charlotte Aubin), a young Quebecoise who lives her life openly. They begin an affair that affects them both profoundly and marks a seismic shift in life for Feng Xia.

Director Xiaodan He builds her story and the characters in it slowly, making it clear why Feng Xia would make the choices she has made. She loves her children and has no regrets about moving across the planet to give them a better life, despite a marriage bound by duty rather than love.

Her stern husband attempts to regain control over Feng Xia and makes tough decisions for the whole family, but he too is fully three-dimensional and his choices likewise make sense. He is undone by the things he cannot control in a culture he doesn’t quite understand and has lost his place, personally and professionally.

All this plays out against a city that sparkles throughout — multicultural, accepting, beautiful to look at. At one point Feng Xia compares the city’s parks to jewels; at another, the women join an outdoor dance lesson and dance with joy and abandon. The movie ends with a loving glance at the city skyline.

Montreal, My Beautiful is understated and touching, and the storytelling inspires great affection for the characters. Alas, the sex scenes between Joan Chen and Charlotte Aubin don’t quite ring true, being a tad over-orchestrated and leaning into melodrama, as is generally the case in movie sex scenes. Why is that? Discuss.

Montreal, My Beautiful. Written and directed by Xiaodan He. Starring Joan Chen, Charlotte Aubin, John Xu, Pei Yao Xu. In theatres in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver starting February 13.