Based on the bizarre true story of the protest-blighted 1970 Miss World contest, Misbehaviour is a charming feminist comedy from BAFTA award-winning director Philippa Lowthorpe, starring Keira Knightley.
In 1970, the Miss World competition took place in London, hosted by US comedy legend, Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear). At the time, Miss World was the most-watched TV show on the planet with over 100 million viewers.
Claiming that beauty competitions demeaned women, the activists Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley) and Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley) from the newly formed Women’s Liberation Movement, achieved overnight fame by invading the stage and disrupting the live broadcast of the competition. Not only that, when the show resumed, the result caused uproar: the winner was not the Swedish favourite but Miss Grenada, Jennifer Hosten (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), the first black woman to be crowned Miss World.
A cheery film in the vein of Made in Dagenham, Lowthorpe’s Misbehaviour tells the tale of a pioneering protest, in which a global audience had witnessed the patriarchy driven from the stage and the Western ideal of beauty turned on its head.