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What price progress in Misbehaviour? |
Director: Philipa Lowthorpe
Cast: Keira Knightley (Sally Alexander), Gugu Mbatha-Raw
(Jennifer Hosten, Miss Grenada), Jessie Buckley (Jo Robinson), Greg Kinnear
(Bob Hope), Lesley Manville (Dolores Hope), Rhys Ifans (Eric Morley), Keeley
Hawes (Julia Morley), Phyllis Logan (Evelyn Alexander), Loreece Harrison (Pearl
Jansen, Miss Africa South), Clara Rosager (Marjorie Johansson, Miss Sweden),
Suki Waterhouse (Sandra Wolsfield, Miss USA), John Heffernan (Gareth Stedman
Jones)
In 1970, the Miss World Competition in London was disrupted
before a world-wide TV audience by Women’s Liberation campaigners, furious at
the competition being the public face of a world that judged women on appearance
rather than personality. The disruption was led by post-graduate UCL student
Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley) and commune radical Jo Robinson (Jessie
Buckley), and rather overshadowed for many the fact that, for the first time in
history, black female competitors like Miss Grenada Jennifer Hoosten (Gugu
Mbatha-Raw) were treated as genuine contenders for the title. Misbehaviour recreates all this
wonderfully, but also makes an intriguing exploration of the different ways
women can make themselves a place in the world.
It would have been very easy for Philipa Lowthorpe’s
engaging film to have designated villains – after all with the casual sexism
and objectification of the Miss World competition, you could easily have
assigned the competition runners as baddies. Instead the film is richer than
that, full of people who genuinely feel they are doing their best in the roles
they’ve been given in life. If there is a villain, it’s society itself which
traps women into certain roles, and doesn’t allow them to grow.
The film follows three plot lines – the women’s liberation
movement, the background of staging the Miss World Competition, and the lives
and expectations of the contestants themselves. Of these three plots, the women’s
liberation movement is surprisingly the least engaging. Keira Knightley and
Jessie Buckley do decent jobs, but their characters are more one-dimensional
and lack real development (they start the film as passionate rebels and end the
film the same way), with this lack of plot being padded out by movie clichés of
the “you’re off the protest” variety.
The real interest surprisingly is the competitors
themselves. Like the protestors, the film is keen to not blame the contestants.
The ones we follow are smart, intelligent, passionate women who are, by and
large, willing to play the game to get their future ambitions realised. We see
this most of all for Miss Grenada and Miss “Africa South” (a black South
African shoe-horned into the competition to counter accusations of legitimising
apartheid): the competition places them in the position of representing
victimised minorities, groups that have their options sharply restricted.
Having spent their lives being told that only being white, blonde and blue-eyed
is beautiful, the chance to set an example to others is important to them – and
the film doesn’t downplay or demean this at all.
This is captured particularly in the exploration of Gugu
Mbatha-Raw’s Miss Grenada, Jennifer Hoosten. A woman willing to use the
competition as a springboard to try and build herself a professional career,
she is an intelligent and dedicated woman who understands the nature of her
competition. Hoosten however rejects being positioned as a victim, as well as
the way Women’s Liberation crams all women’s aims into a single homogenous
goal. Why should another group of women tell her what is best for her – isn’t
that what men have been doing all her life? As a black woman, her only way to
get the opportunities that someone like Sally Alexander has – education and
career – is to play the hand that nature has given her the only way she can. Mbatha-Raw
captures this all extremely well in a quietly judged and affecting performance.
Similar feelings motivate the rest of the competitors. Miss
Africa South (an engaging Loreece Harrison) just wants to keep her head down
and get home to her family, letting her presence alone make her statements.
Miss Sweden (a fiery Clara Rosager) rails against the control and management of
the organisers on every aspect of her life while at the competition. It’s a
film where women are working to find their place in the world, but accepting that
not all those goals will be the same. Keeley Hawes does excellent work as Julia
Morley (co-runner of the competition with her husband, a brash Rhys Ifans), a
woman trying her best to reform the competition from within.
Lowthorpe juggles these interesting themes – giving oxygen
to all these points of view – within a fascinatingly precise reconstruction of
the competition itself and the protest. As part of this Greg Kinnear
contributes a spot-on performance as Bob Hope, here a sexist comedian from a
different era who can’t understand the changing world. The film gets a lot of
comic mileage as well from the jaw-dropping sexism of the BBC coverage and the
drooling perviness of the reporters rushing to interview the competitors.
“This isn’t the end of anything, but this could be a start”
says Lesley Manville in her waspishly delightful cameo as Hope’s wife. She’s
right, the world didn’t change overnight. But as the film captures it started
getting people thinking, even if it accepted that not all women will have the
same view. Sally Alexander and her mother can disagree on women’s roles – “Why
would I want to grow up like you?” Sally berates her housewife mother (very
well played by Phyllis Logan) – but the two characters can still come together
and agree that having opportunities is still better than not. And perhaps
that’s what the film is arguing for: all these women are stretching for opportunities.
And if that means the world needs to change so half the population gets the
same chances as the other half, so be it.
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