Mark Reviews Movies: MISBEHAVIOUR

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 24, 2020

A story of the women's liberation movement and one about the internal workings of a beauty pageant might not seem compatible, except in terms of generating conflict. There is plenty of conflict in Misbehaviour, as the pageant prepares to reach a vast television audience around the world and a group of feminists prepare to launch an attention-grabbing protest against the show, but the results aren't as easy or straightforward as we might anticipate.

That's because screenwriters Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe aren't out to condemn any of the women in this story or to fully embrace everything that each of them has to say. We see both sides of this specific debate—that beauty pageants intrinsically objectify women and that they can provide opportunities that might not otherwise be afforded to women. Philippa Lowthorpe's film doesn't have simple answers, because it recognizes that ideas are to be debated and that every woman's story can't simply be grouped together into a singular narrative of a shared experience.

The film, then, works in two ways. It's intelligent in the way Frayn and Chiappe present assorted arguments—some of them in conflict, some of them in harmony, some of them essentially united but so distinct in terms of perspective that there doesn't seem to be a way to reconcile them. It's also a wise film, though, in the way that it allows the stories of each of these women to define the arguments, to arrive at some clash, and to either find some common ground or accept that the differences in experience make negotiation something far more complex for a single event or moment in history.

On the one side, we follow Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley), a divorcee and single mother living in London. After leaving school for ideological reasons (The place of education seemed more concerned with preparing women to become wives and mothers than with, you know, actual education), she wants to return to earn an advanced degree in history. An interview with a group of school officials establishes the story's main theme immediately: It's a group of men, and two of them scribble down their ratings of Sally before she even has a chance to speak.

On the other side, we follow the Miss World competition as it's readying for the 1970 incarnation of its annual event. The heads of the pageant are the married couple Eric (Rhys Ifans) and Julia Morley (Keeley Hawes), and they're facing some pushback for this year's occasion. Apartheid is ravaging the majority Black population of South Africa, and Eric has to devise a political maneuver—without making it look like one—on the fly. Meanwhile, feminist groups are forming and uniting across the country, and the pageant, which judges women so exclusively on physical appearance (right down to announcing measurements, as if their animals, not people), is fast becoming a target of righteous ire.

Sally becomes involved in one of those groups, hoping to make the world a fairer and more equal place for her young daughter, while also trying to protect her daughter from her mother Evelyn (Phyillis Logan). The mother has some old-fashioned views of a woman's place in society. She's especially skeptical of the way Sally treats her boyfriend Gareth (John Heffernan). Sally sees him as supportive, but Evelyn perceives that her daughter is "emasculating" him.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Hosten (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), the Miss World contestant from Grenada. She faces the hopes of becoming the pageant's winner and the growing suspicion that a Black woman might not meet the pageant's standards of beauty.

It's a complicated dilemma. Indeed, it's a series of complex issues, and the filmmakers let them exist as such in this story. Sally is right in her motives and her moves toward personal fulfillment. Even that, though, has its limitations, as a professor suggests her dissertation thesis about women laborers should be expanded beyond some trendy, "minority" concern. Her comrades-in-protest, mainly Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley, a scene-stealer), have a point, too, that there's no way to work for change within long-established, fully-cemented systems (See, again, how Sally is treated within academia), but without some acceptance of those systems, any kind of protest would be akin to yelling into a void. Sally teaches them how the media can become an unintentional ally.

The film also spends a lot of time with Jennifer and some other contestants, as they more or less acknowledge the limitations of its judgments but accept it as some way to possibly move up in the world. They are treated, as Sally says during a televised debate, essentially as if they're in a "cattle market." It's wrong and treated as such, with Eric and comedian Bob Hope (played with a decreasingly distracting prosthetic nose but an increasing sense of smugness by Greg Kinnear) standing in for the purveyors of and the attitudes generated by this kind of blatant objectification. Even so, some of these women, especially Jennifer and the Black contestant (played by Loreece Harrison) from South Africa, might not have the same opportunities or even the same freedoms as Sally and her fellow protestors.

Frayn and Chiappe's screenplay is overtly political, but it's smartly and cleverly so, especially as the story escalates toward a chaotic "happening" at the pageant (The film is based on a true story, resulting in a series of affecting final shots, in which the fictionalized past looks brightly toward the real future). The filmmakers have the courage, not only to call out the obviously sexist actions and attitudes of certain people and events, but also the shortcomings of looking at a political movement from an insulated perspective. There are many viewpoints in Misbehaviour, and the film gives each of the worthy ones a voice.

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