‘Misbehaviour’: Pretty angry women
The cheerfully one-dimensional “Misbehaviour” puts a smiley face on female rage. A comedy flecked with seriousness, it revisits a 1970 feminist protest against the Miss World pageant in London.
Bright and insistently upbeat, the movie has period polish, some swinging detail and a sympathetic cast headed by Keira Knightley, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Jessie Buckley. Like most commercial movies about feminist history, though, it also has a toothless vision of protest and empowerment that’s doomed to fail its subject because its makers don’t (can’t) risk making the audience uncomfortable.
Directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, the movie personalizes its story with a manageable handful of characters, including Sally Alexander (a fine Knightley), an academic. In short, bouncy scenes, she is shown as smart and ambitious, loved by her family but thwarted by her sexist colleagues, which leads her to join the nascent women’s-liberation movement.
Her ostensible opposite is Jennifer Hosten (Mbatha-Raw), aka Miss Grenada, who arrives amid a sorority of giggling contestants. Jennifer isn’t given much to do or say, but Mbatha-Raw makes it clear that the character has an inner life, with faraway looks that you hope foretell that a more interesting movie is on the horizon.
The two women are readymade for dialectical fun but are largely separated on parallel tracks. The movie estab-
lishes two opposing camps: one populated by the pageant people, the other by the feminists, including Buckley’s Jo Robinson, a live wire.
While men linger in the background on Team Libbers, they take a prominent role on Team Pageant because the filmmakers seem to think the audience needs reminding that men can be, well, sexist. So, rather than deep, revealing looks into the lives of the contestants, there’s a lot of the show’s host, Bob Hope (an affable Greg Kinnear with a fake schnoz).
Lowthorpe spends a wearying amount of time on the comedy of male buffoonery. The marquee clown is Hope, who’s introduced in the open
ing via parallel montage with Sally, and comes with his own aggrieved woman (Lesley Manville, adding bitter tang to Mrs. Hope).
The most cartoonish buffoon, however, is Eric (Rhys Ifans), who, with his wife, Julia (Keeley Hawes), runs the contest. It’s mildly amusing to watch Ifans swan about in a pageant crown and cape when he shows the contestants how to walk onstage. The contenders tee-hee-hee and you might, too, even if there’s nothing all that funny about how strenuously the movie tries to softpedal sexual exploitation.
The one time the movie puts on its deeply serious face is when it addresses race, which it navigates with self
conscious awkwardness culminating in a clunkily handled showdown between Sally and Jennifer. Until then, the issue is largely taken up through Pearl Jansen (Loreece Harrison), the first Black South African contestant. Pearl has some heartfelt moments, like when she explains the circumstances of her participation to Jennifer.
It’s too bad “Misbehaviour” doesn’t explore that nervousness or do justice to the women who became a front-page scandal when they threw flour bombs at Bob Hope and whose slogan was, “We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry.” The scandal wasn’t the protest. The scandal was the anger.