Montreal, My Beautiful

Xiaodan He’s third feature, Montreal, My Beautiful, continues her interest in Chinese culture, migration and the quiet dislocations of immigrant life, but filters them here through a more intimate crisis of self-recognition. Its protagonist, Feng Xia, played with tremendous delicacy by Joan Chen, is a Chinese mother of two living in suburban Montreal. She has been in the French-speaking province for years, yet still does not speak French with confidence. She understands more than she admits, but insecurity has hardened into habit. Her college-age daughter, Joy (Pei Yao Xu), has become a kind of CODA-equivalent interpreter for her, translating the world on her behalf until she refuses to do so anymore, frustrated by her mother’s dependence.

That refusal becomes the film’s modest inciting incident. Feng Xia enrolls in a language class, surrounded by other immigrants negotiating their own terms of arrival and reinvention. There, she is especially drawn to Joseph (Zion-Luna Ribeaux Valdes), a recent arrival from Cuba who explains that he came to Montreal because there he can love men openly. His candor unsettles something in her. Feng Xia begins to recall, though only vaguely and tentatively, an attraction she once felt for a woman in her youth. Soon she signs up for a dating app and meets Camille (Charlotte Aubin), a younger woman in her thirties who works in a pastry café.

On paper, this could easily become either a coming-out melodrama or a late-life romance shaped by familiar beats of repression, awakening and punishment. He’s drama is more interesting because it resists that machinery. It understands Feng Xia not as a symbol of belated liberation, but as a full person whose desires exist alongside marriage, motherhood, immigration, menopause, language shame and accumulated compromise. Desire does not arrive here as a clean break from domestic life. It appears as a tremor inside it.

Chen gives one of her finest performances by locating Feng Xia’s emotional life in hesitation. She is shy, watchful and careful, describing herself at one point as simple, much like Montreal itself. But the film does not mistake simplicity for emptiness. In Chen’s hands, Feng Xia’s reticence becomes a surface under which decades of feeling press upward. A glance, a delayed answer, a slight change in posture can suggest the scale of what she has learned not to say.

The Chinese-Canadian writer-director’s feature is also attentive to the parallel frustration of Feng Xia’s husband, Wang Jun (John Xu), now a convenience store owner in Montreal but still hoping to return to his original profession. His struggle is shaped by the familiar immigrant wound of unrecognised qualifications and interrupted careers, and He refuses to treat it as background noise. He’s priorities, injuries and disappointments exert their own claim over Feng Xia’s life. That is part of the film’s intelligence: no one’s pain cancels out anyone else’s, yet neither does it justify the erasure of Feng Xia’s interior world.

Marie Davignon’s cinematography gives this restraint a striking visual form, often framing Chen against vivid monochromatic backgrounds that heighten rather than overwhelm her elegance. The images insist that quietness can be profound, and that a life apparently reduced by routine may still contain startling colour.

What lingers most in Montreal, My Beautiful is its refusal to force life into moral symmetry. In a conversation with her daughter, Feng Xia says that in life some things have no answer or justice. The film honours that thought. It does not resolve desire into triumph or tragedy. Instead, it allows Feng Xia to exist in the unresolved space between what has been lived, what has been lost, and what might still be felt.

Reviewed on: 14 Jun 2026