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PG, 104 minutes. Madison Art Cinemas, Olde Mistick Village Art Cinemas.

"Belle" is a movie that instantly joins the ranks of the screen's great period-piece romances. Imagine a Jane Austen adaptation, with all its Empire waistlines and romantic longing, but a film in which the obstacles to love are far greater than mere social standing, a story that transcends its comedy of manners frame and is actually about something? "Belle" is loosely based on the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of an aristocratic white Royal Navy captain (Matthew Goode) and a black woman. That sort of thing happened in 18th century England, but polite people didn't speak of it. And a child born of such a union faced a hard life of the same drudgery that befell England's slaves and freed blacks - servants, as a class. "I am here to take you to a good life," her father says after her mother, whom he did not marry, dies. And so he does. Belle, or "Dido," as her new family calls her, comes to live at Kenwood House in Hampstead. She will be raised by her father's uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson), his wife (Emily Watson), and the lord's spinster sister (Penelope Wilton of "Downton Abbey"). Her upbringing will be alternately kind and generous for its day, and circumscribed. She will be companion to the other niece they're raising, Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon), and enjoy all the education and privilege life has to offer. But when company comes, Dido (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) will dine by herself. Amma Assante's film is very much a chamber piece, intimate and romantic, full of actors in beautiful period costumes requesting the pleasure of "taking a turn" about the grounds with one other. But it is breathtakingly ambitious for such a piece, taking us back to that age and letting us see slavery, in all its inhuman ugliness, through Mbatha-Raw's huge, expressive eyes. She is a revelation, suggesting Dido's curiosity and confusion at her odd station in life, and spirit that just wasn't allowed in someone of her gender or race back then.

- Roger Moore, McClatchy