The year is 1970, the Beatles have disbanded, the first Boeing 747 commercial flight from New York to London has graced the skies, the crew aboard the Apollo 13 mission to the moon safely splash land in the Pacific Ocean; the world is looking more modern and technically advanced, there is a stirring in the waters politically and socially, all the right protests are happening to stop nuclear weapons distribution and voting ages have been lowered.
But, on the night of November 20 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, 58 beautiful and talented women pivoted on their heels to have their rear profiles judged and scored for the Miss World pageant.
As I watched, I had to remind myself that this is what we considered ‘family entertainment’ at the time, and that the Miss World pageant was broadcast worldwide and made front-page headlines in print publications worldwide as well.
This particular pageant in 1970 was ground-breaking for so many reasons. The winner was Jennifer Hosten from Grenada (played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) making her the first women of colour to win a Miss World.
South Africa submitted two candidates on either side of the country's racial divide; Pearl Jansen was, due to apartheid, Miss Africa South (played by Loreece Harrison), while Jillian Jessup was Miss South Africa (familiar face from The Crown, Emma Corrin).
It was the first pageant to be protested from the audience — which is the key narrative of this film.
The movie starts slowly, as we are introduced to the key characters; Keira Knightley and Jessie Buckley play Sally Alexander and Jo Robinson of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Bob Hope (played by Greg Kinnear) is a fairly unlikeable character, his eyes always straying to the youngest, prettiest girl in the room.
His long-suffering wife Dolores Hope played by Lesley Manville, who despite being subjected to witnessing her husband’s philandering, delivers one of the best scenes — a simple reaction, but I wanted to stand up and start applauding, I won’t spoil this moment, but you will see what I mean.
The movie captures your interest in the women of the pageant, the politics around them, and the rise of the Women's Liberation Movement.
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Advertise with NZME.There are poignant moments when we see Knightley's character physically fume at the reactions of male colleagues to certain ideas she has about female equality. It feels unsettling that it was so recently that we even had to fight for these equalities (and, for many women, still do).
The night of the pageant creeps up on you as a viewer, and the timbre of the movie suddenly ascends into utter (delightful) chaos!
The Women's Liberation group rises from their seats when Bob Hope is present on the stage, spouting some distasteful joke about staring at women, and he is pelted with bags of flour as the group runs through the audience. Behind the scenes we see the stagehand running to the control room to halt the broadcast — this was live television after all.
Four women, including Sally Alexander and Jo Robinson, are arrested for disturbing the peace that night, but the ripple had begun and the Women's Liberation Movement would eventually attract supporters in their thousands.
It was very important that the movie portrayed that this protest was never a protest against the women competing in the pageant, more about the event itself and how it objectified women — a short interaction between Sally Alexander and the pageant's winner Jennifer Hosten, provides us with a moment of connection for both parties.
I thoroughly enjoyed Misbehaviour; it captured a moment in time without trying to make it more than it was because, in its reality, it was a very notable and highly publicised protest that was given worldwide recognition and began to force the public to view this event without rose-tinted glasses.
The montage of the characters in real life at the end of the film serves as a jolt of reality, a timely reminder that maybe we are still fighting for things that seem so archaic and that maybe we all need a bit more Sally Robinson fire in us from time to time.
Misbehaviour is in cinemas around New Zealand now.
