Chinese-Canadian writer-director Xiaodan He’s film Montreal, My Beautiful is a thoughtful, understated independent film with an ace up its sleeve: the film’s protagonist is played by Joan Chen, whose incandescent screen presence and expertly controlled dramatic range are deployed to great effect by He. He falls into a few common traps — the film’s structure and pacing are spotty, and the narrative focus strays at times — but Chen’s excellent performance, bolstered by He’s emotionally astute rendering of her character, carries the film.
Chen plays Feng Xia, the matriarch of a tight-knit Montreal family. Feng Xia and her husband Wang Jun (John Xu) emigrated from China to Canada years before to raise a family. Despite their love for their children, there is an inevitable cultural disconnect within the family: the parents speak mostly in Chinese, while their 18-year-old daughter Joy (Pei Yao Xu) and school-aged son Dong Dong (Anzhe “Angelo” Zhang) are native French speakers with little knowledge of their parents’ language or culture. At the film’s outset, Feng takes small steps to interact more with local culture and to explore long-buried aspects of herself: she begins taking French classes, and she surreptitiously downloads a queer dating app to meet women. What begins as a tentative exploration of her sexuality leads to a deeper reckoning with herself when she meets Camille (Charlotte Aubin), an openly lesbian woman over 20 years her junior. After an initial spark of chemistry, they meet with increasing frequency, and with correspondingly increasing intimacy. While their slowly unfurling love expands Feng’s sense of herself, it also poses a significant threat to her family life.
He uses the character of Feng as a locus for tensions surrounding cultural, national, and sexual identity. Feng’s relationships with her family members, Camille, and both her native country and her current home are in a state of flux; her well-crafted character arc provides plenty of opportunities for exploration of how immigration can create a multifaceted, shifting self-identity that may create insoluble conflicts in all spheres of one’s life. The social commentary is effectively handled, but the audience’s emotional buy-in relies on believing Feng as a dimensional human being. He is careful to write Feng with both sympathy and complexity, yet it is Chen who truly vivifies the character. Faced with the challenging task of playing a character who views herself as “simple” and meek, but who contains much more depth than she allows herself to access, Chen plays much of Feng’s development on the level of subtext, allowing micro-expressions and subtle reactions to chart her character arc. He smartly shoots Chen in close-up for much of the film, allowing the audience an intimate view of the emotions shifting across Chen’s face like tectonic plates. The scenes in which Feng experiences true emotional overwhelm, played by Chen with moving uninhibitedness, are all the more affecting for their contrast with Feng’s typically restrained demeanor.
For all its strengths, Montreal, My Beautiful can veer toward aimlessness at times. The film has a number of false starts, and it ends too abruptly. Along the way, scenes that read as extraneous pop up regularly and slow the pacing of this already patient film. He’s film also suffers when she allows her focus to drift away from Feng; subplots involving Camille and Wang Jun, while ultimately proving narratively important, are given too much screentime for a film that works best when it is tightly focused on its protagonist. Still, the heart of the film lies with Feng Xia, and Chen’s performance is likely to leave a lasting emotional impression on audiences.
Published as part of NYAFF 2026 — Dispatch 2.
Comments are closed.