Misbehaviour (2020)

Misbehaviour (2020) is about the 1970 Miss World competition in London, which was disrupted by Women’s Liberation protesters (and other anti-establishment protesters). It follows Sally (Keira Knightley), a “mature” student at University College London (at the ripe old age of 27) who is understandably fed up with the patriarchy and is looking for ways to level the playing field for women. She almost immediately crosses paths with Jo (Jessie Buckley), a younger woman whose approach to ending the patriarchy is quite a bit more extreme than hers. They form an uneasy alliance and eventually both come to appreciate the other’s strengths as their group plan to protest the Miss World competition.

The story weaves Sally’s home life as a through-thread, showing her trying to balance being a mother of a small girl, butting heads with her own mother who is far more conventional in her views of how a woman should act, and her own demoralizing attempts to get men to just fucking listen. 

The film intercuts this plot with that of the Miss World competitors and organizers. Throughout the course of the film you see how the women involved with the production, from the pageant runners to the competitors themselves are all variously trying to advance feminism, whether or not they consciously understand it as that. Sally’s counterpart is “Miss Granada,” Jennifer Hosten (played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who hopes to leverage the competition into a career in broadcasting. “Miss Africa South,” Pearl Jansen (Loreece Harrison) is a last-minute addition to the competition when an anti-apartheid activist ambushes the pageant founder Eric Morley (Rhys Ifans, who I completely didn’t recognize) about having a white South African competitor but no black South African counterpart. Morley has Pearl added to the lineup and contrives the title “Miss Africa South” to shut down the activists.

The third story arc deals with Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear) and his wife Dolores (Lesley Manville) and their fraught relationship as a result of Hope’s womanizing and overall just shitty behavior. His affair with Miss World 1961 is referenced repeatedly, and Dolores is dragged along, though she really doesn’t do much except cackle from her opulent suite when the Women’s Libbers disrupt the broadcast.

The film does take a lot of liberties with the history, but it’s mainly due to time constraints. A feature-length film is never going to adequately cover a group of activists who were involved in civil disruption campaigns throughout the 1970s, not just the Miss World competition. And some critics have waved off the film as trivializing what Sally Alexander and her cohort were attempting to do within this very narrow scope, but I thought the film struck a decent balance with giving each of the female leads enough to work with to convey the broader strokes of the history and keep the tempo of the film from faltering.

There were times where I legitimately felt my pulse racing, even though I knew how the story was going to end (no one was seriously hurt, Jennifer Hosten wins and becomes the first woman of color to reign as Miss World, and Sally Alexander gets her dream job teaching history at University College London). In reading the reviews on the film, the vast majority of them called it “fun” and made it sound lighthearted, but it’s way deeper than that. Maybe I’m just watching this through the jaded lens of [gestures vaguely to all the fuckery in the U.S. right now] but I’d rate this film as maybe 25% more fun than The Handmaid’s Tale if you’re at all paying attention to it.

Have you seen Misbehaviour (2020)? Tell us your thoughts in the comments!

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