Miss World drama cannot decide what sort of film it wants to be
Misbehaviour 12A cert, 106 min ★★★★★
Dir: Philippa Lowthorpe Starring: Keira Knightley, Gugu Mbatha-raw, Jessie Buckley, Rhys Ifans, Keeley Hawes, Lesley Manville, Greg Kinnear, Phyllis Logan, John Heffernan
Misbehaviour gives us ringside seats at the 1970 Miss World beauty pageant – otherwise known as the one with the flour-flinging, a bomb under a BBC van, and the first winner of colour taking the crown. Preceded by weeks of feminist protest, it was also subject to unusually intense media scrutiny about the pair of South African contestants – one white, one black – who were flown to London in an awkward bid to keep both sides happy in the era of apartheid.
Philippa Lowthorpe’s film is partly a history lesson in the Suffragette vein, but also tries for the period pop and colour that gave a more comic edge to Made in Dagenham and Pride – crowdpleasing true stories about flashpoints of social activism.
The film is dotted with unlikely allies – even those who never meet. Take Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley), the feminist campaigner (now veteran historian) who infiltrated the pageant with fellow firebrands to stage an intervention on live television. While she’s unacquainted with Dolores Hope (Lesley Manville), long-suffering wife of the indisputably chauvinist Bob (Greg Kinnear), they both get to see this showbiz dinosaur taken down a peg, when his rancid stint as Miss World’s presenter ends in floury humiliation.
Even the impeccably poised Julia Morley (Keeley Hawes) – chairman of the Miss World Organisation to this day, and for many years married to its founder, Eric Morley (Rhys Ifans) – is shown in a shaded light, certainly more conscious than her cheerily vulgar husband of a need to move with the times. Days after the event, she briefly resigned in the flurry of controversy surrounding the prime minister of Grenada, Sir Eric Gairy, being given a spot on the judging panel.
In fact, there are codicils to the real-life contest that Misbehaviour only manages to glance at. The film is torn between two points of view – on the one hand, we get the outcry of women’s libbers at models in swimwear being paraded around, but because 1970 was such a banner one for racial reasons, things aren’t quite that simple. Knightley’s Sally has a single encounter with Grenadian beauty queen Jennifer Hosten (Gugu Mbatha-raw, just right), but the scene underlines how far apart they are in privilege: the power of television representation for a nonwhite contestant hasn’t factored into Sally’s thinking at all.
Caught in a tug-of-war between these two inimical angles, the film never blows up with the anarchic fury you’re hoping for – it’s polite and balanced to a dithering degree. True, Jessie Buckley is meant to be the wild card, rolling her eyes at Sally’s bourgeois ways, but the part isn’t well-rounded enough, and she defaults into panto mugging.
Luckily we’re on safer ground with Knightley, quietly severe and keeping a lid on her bluestocking frustration. Kinnear’s Hope impression is quite nifty, Manville does a smooth line in pampered fatigue, and Ifans is in his element as the flustered MC, who he manages to sketch with enough sneaky warmth that we don’t hate him.
Pick of the bunch, though, is Phyllis Logan as Sally’s ultra-traditional mother, a stickler in twinset and pearls who refuses to accept that the mores of her generation about beauty standards are quite such old hat. Misbehaviour has heaps more time for her than a lesser film would.