Misbehaviour (12A.)
Directed by Philippa Lowthorpe.
Starring Keira Knightley, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jessie Buckley, Keeley Hawes, Rhys Ifans, Lesley Manville and Greg Kinnear. 106 mins.
A film about early feminists disrupting the 1970 Miss World pageant is just the sort of topic that the British film industry is apt to get completely wrong, with toe-curling righteousness and period detail fetishism. This though is a surprisingly entertaining account of a clash of contrasting certainties that explores all the anomalies and vagaries.
I think the film's major asset is the aspect that it will be most criticised for – a lack of focus. It flips between Keira and Buckley at the birth of the Women's Liberation movement; the excited contestants, including a Miss Grenada (Mbatha-Raw), flying into London for their big moment; Julia and Eric Morley (Hawes and Ifans) organising it and Bob Hope (Kinnear) agreeing to be the special guest star.
The film never really lays down a tone; it's light-hearted but not funny, serious but lightweight. At times it seems like the advancement of the Women's Movement is being dramatised as the struggle of free-spirited graffiti activist Buckley to get underversity student Knightley to lighten up a bit. The recreation of the Miss World protest both exaggerates and underplays the impact of the incident. Footage on YouTube gives the incident an eerie, otherworldly quality; here it's like the hi-jinks finale of a Carry On, Come-on-girls, let's-get-em. Yet the sequence ends – spoiler - with Knightley seeming to point some kind of, presumably fake, pistol at Hope, an action that comes out of nowhere, doesn't seem to bear any relation to the rest of the film or what happened and is allowed to pass without explanation or consequence.
Early on someone appears very briefly as anti-apartheid campaigner Peter Hain and the voice is spot on. In comparison, the other performers don't really nail their impersonations. Ifans makes Morley the Fagin of swimwear contestants but he's about a foot too tall to convince as Eric Morley and lacks the essential Reg Varney-ness the role requires. Kinnear's Bob Hope is a generic slick golfing showbiz slimeball but so lacking in nuance it's hard to believe it's based on a real person; every time he was on screen I had to wrack my brains trying to remember what Bob Hope was really like.
There aren't many sympathetic male characters but the film is even-handed. It's at least as sympathetic to the contestants as the protestors and everybody gets their voices heard; even Hope is given a moment of reflection near the end. There's a nostalgia in the film's appeal. It's reassuring to look back and see that society then was just as riven by division and oppression as it is now.
Some things have changed though. Early on Knightley's character complains, "One half of the world has all the power and the other half has to lump it," and you may reflect at that point how long its been since there was a simple fifty/ fifty split in oppression. We're all in the cattle market now.
Directed by Philippa Lowthorpe.
Starring Keira Knightley, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jessie Buckley, Keeley Hawes, Rhys Ifans, Lesley Manville and Greg Kinnear. 106 mins.
A film about early feminists disrupting the 1970 Miss World pageant is just the sort of topic that the British film industry is apt to get completely wrong, with toe-curling righteousness and period detail fetishism. This though is a surprisingly entertaining account of a clash of contrasting certainties that explores all the anomalies and vagaries.
I think the film's major asset is the aspect that it will be most criticised for – a lack of focus. It flips between Keira and Buckley at the birth of the Women's Liberation movement; the excited contestants, including a Miss Grenada (Mbatha-Raw), flying into London for their big moment; Julia and Eric Morley (Hawes and Ifans) organising it and Bob Hope (Kinnear) agreeing to be the special guest star.
The film never really lays down a tone; it's light-hearted but not funny, serious but lightweight. At times it seems like the advancement of the Women's Movement is being dramatised as the struggle of free-spirited graffiti activist Buckley to get underversity student Knightley to lighten up a bit. The recreation of the Miss World protest both exaggerates and underplays the impact of the incident. Footage on YouTube gives the incident an eerie, otherworldly quality; here it's like the hi-jinks finale of a Carry On, Come-on-girls, let's-get-em. Yet the sequence ends – spoiler - with Knightley seeming to point some kind of, presumably fake, pistol at Hope, an action that comes out of nowhere, doesn't seem to bear any relation to the rest of the film or what happened and is allowed to pass without explanation or consequence.
Early on someone appears very briefly as anti-apartheid campaigner Peter Hain and the voice is spot on. In comparison, the other performers don't really nail their impersonations. Ifans makes Morley the Fagin of swimwear contestants but he's about a foot too tall to convince as Eric Morley and lacks the essential Reg Varney-ness the role requires. Kinnear's Bob Hope is a generic slick golfing showbiz slimeball but so lacking in nuance it's hard to believe it's based on a real person; every time he was on screen I had to wrack my brains trying to remember what Bob Hope was really like.
There aren't many sympathetic male characters but the film is even-handed. It's at least as sympathetic to the contestants as the protestors and everybody gets their voices heard; even Hope is given a moment of reflection near the end. There's a nostalgia in the film's appeal. It's reassuring to look back and see that society then was just as riven by division and oppression as it is now.
Some things have changed though. Early on Knightley's character complains, "One half of the world has all the power and the other half has to lump it," and you may reflect at that point how long its been since there was a simple fifty/ fifty split in oppression. We're all in the cattle market now.
