Misbehaviour (2020) - Movie Review

What is feminism? With how easy it is to caricature basically any and all political movements (even the ones you personally support), it’s just as easy to lose sight of what a given movement stands for when it seems like everyone has their own idea of it. And not all of them are exactly accurate. Feminism especially has this problem in the popular consciousness, encompassing everything from equal rights to #killallmen. Of course, it’s also one of those catch-all terms like Satanism or post-modern Neo-Marxism or The Left™ that gets thrown around by people who basically want to lump everything they don’t approve of into a single category. So it comes as something of a surprise when a mainstream feature like Misbehaviour comes out, which manages to clear the air in rather bracing fashion.

Framed around the 1970 Miss World competition, it splits its focus between the people involved in the pageant like founder Eric Morley (Rhys Ifans), guest host Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear), and contestants like Jennifer Hosten (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), and the women’s lib movement looking to protest it, namely academic Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley) and firebrand Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley). There’s a lot of commentary about what competitions like Miss World say about the status of women, from Hope’s open womanising, to the reduction of human beings to three sets of numbers, right down to how it reinforces the idea that, for a woman, this is as big a platform as they’re likely to get.

It’s quite polemic, and proudly so, but the way it handles that revolutionary spirit shows remarkable clarity. Again with the ease of caricature in mind, films like this can even fall into unintentional mockery depending on how it plays with the popular conception of such matters. And here, they manage to cover all the requisite groundwork, even making it a point not to shame the women who voluntarily took part in Miss World, instead shining a light on the male higher-ups for deeming this whole charade so bleeding necessary.

Where the film becomes genuinely fresh is how it brings intersectionality into the equation. Something that gets left out of the conversation far too often is that the places where these sorts of protests actually catch fire within the media, and the people who wage them, tend to be predominantly white. They tend to live in countries that, at least on an ostensible level, allow the freedom to protest. Not everyone is so lucky, though, and when Sally comes face-to-face with Jennifer Hosten, the audience is given food for thought that there are other ways of progression than disrupting the system.

I know, I know, at this particular point in our own history, that seems like a naïve thing to say. We’re collectively moving past the point where changing the system from the inside-out is a viable option, since that usually ends up validating that very system in the first place. But that’s where the other half of this film’s salience comes into play. It highlights how there isn’t just one form of feminism out there, and it all comes down to the main thing that makes feminism (far as I’m concerned) worth supporting at its core: Giving the ability to choose.

Whether it’s wanting a better system than one that rather literally objectifies women, changing the parameters of that system to include more than a singular idea of what a woman looks like, choosing to mother children, choosing not to, working in academia, media, playing Ophelia, or just wanting to show off what you’ve got; it’s all valid. It’s just that there shouldn’t be a blanket rule that a woman only has worth as one thing.

And it’s because of that that this film managing to do due diligence when it comes to real-world feminism, and a touchstone moment for the movement, is as worthy of praise as it is. It’s a nicely unifying effort, one that gives like-minded viewers a chance to check their privileges, but without shaming them in the process. It’s a weirdly non-confronting depiction of feminism, since it’s wrapped up in so much British feel-good energy, but underneath that lies a surprising level of understanding about the many facets of the movement, and how there’s more than one way to skin the patriarchy.