Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Kiera Knightley, Jessie Buckley, Greg Kinnear, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Loreece Harrison, Suki Waterhouse, Clara Rosager, Lesley Manville, Eileen O’Higgins, Laural Lefkow, Amanda Lawrence, Samuel Blenkin, Nicholas Nunn, Phyllis Logan, Daniel Tiplady, Kajsa Mohammar, John Heffernan, Miles Jupp.
What we remember of modern history can define us in more ways that we perhaps understand, the influence on our childhood can either scar us and urge us to prepare others to join the fight against such injustice from ever happening again, or we are conditioned to believe that such lofty ideals are the norm, that in the constant struggle against oppression. We understand instinctively that the world is not balanced correctly and fairly, but instead of fighting, we shake our heads and thank our genes or standing that we are on the right side of history. That we refuse to join in with the fight because of such accidents of birth, we are immune to being part of change.
Looking back with fresh eyes at a period of time in which women couldn’t even open their own bank accounts without her husband’s permission, in which a woman didn’t have autonomy over her own body, is today not just ridiculous, it is absurd, preposterous, irrational, and yet for men born into a different world, an era in which subservience of the female gender was expected and laws were in place to keep the status quo were in place, such details were blindly observed as if by right, there was seen to be nothing wrong with such attitudes.
Under the careful and watchful eye of Director Phillipa Lowthorpe, the boiling rage of half the population of the world that was keenly felt as the ’60s and 1970s faded into one another, is captured with a sense of keen outrage and anger as the events surrounding the Bob Hope-hosted Miss World pageant of 1970 took a dramatic and inspired turn.
Misbehaviour is a film that not only captures a sense of time, but of thought. The post-World War Two era that should have ushered in radical expression and equality had somehow managed to conspire with patriarch teachings and keep the future on hold.
The struggle against this outmoded opinion is not yet won, but if it wasn’t for the likes of Sally Alexander and Jo Robinson, played by Keira Knightley and the excellent Jessie Buckley, taking the fight directly to the heart of sexist dogma, then the world today would be desperately and shamingly different, a place where women would still be dragged down and defined by their gender. This is not a world to embrace, we must do everything we can to ensure that sexism of any kind is eradicated fully and forever.
A film on history, a film that grabs the lapels of the sexist-deniers and shows them that they are on the wrong side of the future. Misbehaviour is gritty, unrepentant, and filled with belief
Ian D. Hall