An ultramodern look at love and sex shuffles about onscreen in Marion Hill’s misty feature debut Ma Belle, My Beauty, projecting queer lust with a bountiful but chill sense of possibility. Most excitingly, the film presents the sexual-romantic entanglements of its characters outside of the cinema’s typical binaries. Here Hill serves us a drama closer to reality, where polyamory and bisexuality are presented with frank naturalism, unfetishized as more purile films might examine them as othered. But though unpretentious clearheadedness Hill provides regarding sex in the modern world creates a bounty of freshness to the experience of watching the film, that frankness doesn’t translate to characters we find all that interesting. Nor does the picturesque lifestyle of those characters feel recognizably relatable on a human level.
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