Dir:

Amma Asante

With: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Emily Watson, Tom Wilkinson

Runtime: 104 minutes

IF you go down to the multiplex woods today you are sure of a moderately sized surprise. From tomorrow and for the next month, cinemas will be home to more touchy-feely, explore-your-emotions pictures that could only be more obviously targeted at the female of the film-watching species if management placed scatter cushions everywhere and laid on foot-rubs. Man, anyone would think there was a World Cup starting.

Usually, this is the season of dopey-rom coms and second rate dramas hauled out from the back of studio cupboards. Not this time, though. This World Cup summer kicks off in a highly promising fashion with the period drama Belle. It is directed by Amma Asante, whose debut drama about racism, A Way of Life (2004), showed her to be a quietly radical British filmmaker unafraid to stir things up. She does the same here with a swan-like picture which wears its effort and intelligence lightly.

Belle is based on the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of an African woman and a British naval officer who was given into the care of her uncle, Lord Mansfield, the Scots-born Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales.

The film opens in 1769, with the handover of the child to Mansfield and his wife (Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson), and a promise to Belle from her father that this is the life to which she was born. Mansfield duly brings her up as the equal of another child in his care, Belle's cousin, but this is 18th-century England, where the grisly business of slavery is at its height. Belle (played in childhood by Lauren Julien-Box) may have rights and respect within Mansfield's home, but in the world outside she has none.

Asante, working from a screenplay by Misan Sagay, establishes the temperature of the times in subtle ways, showing us that Belle is just like any other girl of her age and her family's social standing - except, crucially, for the colour of her skin.

It is only gradually, as Belle grows older and her social life changes, that the prejudice she encounters begins to show its ugly face. Belle (now played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) might dine with the family, for instance, but on nights when there are guests she must absent herself from the table. And when her cousin does the London season, it is made clear to Belle, in a polite, oh so British fashion, that she will not be accompanying her.

Having set her story up discreetly, Asante then wheels on the big dramatic guns in the shape of a landmark case Mansfield is hearing which pits slave traders against abolitionists. This is the outside world come to Belle's door, and far from wanting to shut herself away from such matters, she is keen to know more, despite the risks this entails, not least to her fragile sense of self.

Asante lays on all the trappings of a period drama, with enough frilly bonnets, rattling carriages, manicured lawns and glittering balls to keep even the most ardent fan of Austen entranced. But there is also a steeliness at work here, and some tough scenes for Gugu Mbatha-Raw to navigate, not least when Belle enters into society only to encounter outright contempt from supposedly civilised folk.

This is a period drama, but Asante is determined that there will be no cobwebs on her tale.

With such a deft directorial hand at work, one can forgive the obtrusive score and the plodding treatment of the court case, which at some points threatens to drag the picture down with detail. Equal to Asante's assured direction and Sagay's nicely layered screenplay is the wise- beyond-her-years performance of Mbatha-Raw.

Faced with a stately home's worth of character actors who have been doing this kind of lark for years, she glides through the picture as if to the genre born, bringing a freshness, intelligence and edge to proceedings. This is one face we will be seeing on screens again, World Cup or no World Cup.