Misbehaviour: A Movie Review

By Aria-Joshes Waterford

Misbehaviour is a movie about the women’s liberation movement in the year 1970 and how it coincided with the Miss World beauty pageant of that year. It depicts how this particular event put the women’s liberation movement on the map. The story follows a single mother, Sally, who tries to make it in the world of academia but finds herself crossing paths with the women’s liberation movement at this time. Sally finds it hard to gain equal status with the men at her university and naturally strikes an alliance with the radical feminists as she crosses paths with Jo Ann who regularly vandalises public places in order to fight the patriarchal constructs of society. Meanwhile Jennifer from Grenada hopes to win Miss World in order to gain more opportunities for herself in a world where minorities and immigrants are also oppressed.

This movie isn’t your typical feminist film. It’s educational but also raw and authentic. It’s also a feminist film that is uniquely unbiased in order to prove its point and tell a story about the movement. It’s about how a woman’s struggle to find her place in the world is unique to each woman and that there is no single road to empowerment.

The main objective goal of the second wave of the feminist movement was to get the women out of the home and apart of working society. Their options were very limited and for a woman to speak up for herself was still frowned upon. This movie accurately shows the varying struggles for women at this time and how many men of this time didn’t see the harm in their sexist views. The men of this time thought that women fighting against objectification made them out to be sick individuals.

Keira Knightly plays a very different role in this film to what roles she is typically typecast in. Her roles are usually romantic but she still usually plays strong and independent characters. I remember her debut film being Bend it like Beckham which had a feminist tone to the film but I’ve never seen her in a film about the feminist movement. Keira Knightly’s makeup and costumes are usually quite glamorous but in this film she looks very different as she sports a natural look. Her role as Sally shows her versatile acting ability. If this movie had been released before the pandemic, Keira would have been up for an academy award, deservedly.

This film is an enjoyable and educational film and shows just how hard older generations had to forge better opportunities for women today. Although there are many millennial feminists that don’t agree with second wave feminists, it is still important that we pay our respects to past generations of feminists and how hard they had to work to gain us the many freedoms that we take for granted. This movie is a lovely sentiment to the second wave of feminists and how every woman's battle in society is different. We are not perfect but when we make mistakes we can apologize, promise to do better and move on.

Aria-Joshes Waterford

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