Tag: Feminism

Misbehaviour

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

One of the great achievements of the British historical drama Misbehaviour is that it recreates a single event on which two separate stories hang. The 1970 Miss World competition coincided with the rise of not only the nascent women’s liberation movement but also increasing international unease with South Africa’s Apartheid regime. The pitfall awaiting anyone writing a script about all this (or directing one) is that it means constantly walking a tightrope, getting the balance right so that justice is done to both intertwining narratives. It is to Misbehaviour’s great credit that it manages to pull off this difficult feat.

On the one hand, Women’s Lib activists would disrupt the ceremony with flour bombs after claiming it was nothing more, nothing less than a cattle market. On the other, there were two entrants from South Africa, one white, one black. Although the London-based Miss World was a popular annual event begun in 1951 which by 1970 had become a regular fixture in the television calendar, it was open to charges of both objectifying women and tending to favour white winners (notwithstanding the fact that Miss World 1966 was an Indian, a fact omitted here).

The two narratives are very much an insider’s and an outsider’s view of the contest. The insiders are the organisers Eric and Julia Morley (Rhys Ifans and Keeley Hawes), their special guest star Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear) and his savvy wife Dolores (Lesley Manville), and last but most definitely not least the contestants, most notably favourite-to-win Miss Sweden (Clara Rosager) and two black contestants Miss Africa South (Loreece Harrison) and Miss Grenada (Gugu M’batha-Raw). The outsiders are the Women’s Libbers, an Islington collective headed by force of nature Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley) joined by University College London history student Sally Alexander (Keira Knightly) who gets volunteered into becoming the group’s press spokesperson for TV talk shows.

The presence of two Miss South Africas represents a shrewd strategy by Eric to avoid an anti-Apartheid boycott of the contest. He and his wife are putting on a show / running a business and trying to make everything go like clockwork. The white Miss Sweden can be seen chafing against the establishment nature of the event while the two black girls are glad to be there but convinced neither of them has a chance of winning. Dolores Hope, meanwhile, is well aware her husband has an eye for the ladies and Manville’s astutely observed performance makes it very clear that she not he wears the trousers in their relationship.

The pleasures on offer here are many. The script is clever, the casting smart, the production design spot on. Articulate and intelligent student Sally is seen sidelined by male tutors and students purely on the basis of gender, told for example that to write a thesis on female workers is ‘niche’. All this fuels her as the token protester on panel discussions at the oh so establishment BBC. She is also the one who gets Jo and her fellow protesters to dress down so that when they turn up with tickets they won’t get refused entry to the contest. Kinnear exudes just the right of smarmy charm as celebrity Hope. Ifans generates a seedy respectability as instigator and organiser while Hawes as his wife comes across as a shrewd businesswoman who won’t stand for any nonsense and sticks up for the contestants.

From early close ups shots of 1970 ladies’ boots, shoes and dresses through creches with men looking after the kids for their female activist partners to the interior of the Princess Theatre where the contest takes place (presumably the real life location the Albert Hall wouldn’t give permission for filming), you feel like you’re back in the London of 1970. (I speak as one who was a pre-teen in London at the time: watching it felt like I was really back there again.)

Director Lowthorpe brilliantly pulls it all together in a film which understands the issues as they were then and as they are now. It may be hard for today’s twentysomething feminists to understand what the world was like at that time, but this film will give you a pretty accurate idea of not only the fashions and the complicity, but also the rebel mindset that started to take it all apart. As a title at the end mentions, the Patriarchy still needs taking down one event at a time. Wherever your head is at, watching Misbehaviour is a good place to start.

Misbehaviour is out in the UK on Friday, March 13th. On VoD from Wednesday, April 15th. Watch the film trailer below:

The Misandrists

Posted on by victorfraga

Not since Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and Patty Jenkins’s Monster (2003) have you seen such rabid females expressing their repulsion of men. They despise their odour, their presence, their proximity and their existence. They refuse to live in a phallocentric society. What’s more, they do not strive for equality, as they don’t want to mirror themselves against what they see as a corrupt establishment. Welcome to the world of The Misandrists.

Bruce LaBruce’s latest film is a return to the politics of sex, which he explored in minute detail in Rapsberry Reich (2004), plus a commentary on extreme feminism. These female characters seek “to reconcile the revolutionary need with sexual politics” by rejecting men and setting up their Female Liberation Army (FLA) in an unidentified remote location.

Seven young women live under the purview of Big Mother (Susanne Sachsse) and her loyal sidekicks Sister Barbara, Sister Kembra, Sister Grete and Sister Dagmar. Until one day Isolde (Kita Updike) decides to harbour a wounded male fugitive in the basement, despite knowing that this represents a gross violation of the rules. Her misconducted is finally exposed, but that’s not the only surprise she has in store. Plenty of commotion and blood will follow.

LaBruce has retained his usual auteur trademark, as he weaves elements of pornography with Marxist rhetoric, plus throwing in a few experimental devices. It’s also a tribute to cinema itself, as the cinephilic director references a number of movies, including The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971) and The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967). There are probably many more which only the extremely observant and fine-tuned will be able to identify. The film is also dotted with washed-out images of pillow fights, which are a tribute to lesbian erotica from the 1970s.

Some of the most recognisable devices of extreme feminism are also present: the desire for parthenogenesis (reproduction from a non-fertilised egg, where males are redundant) and the replacement of HIStory with HERstory (despite the etymology of the word having no connection with males whatsoever). Such extreme ideas are often associated to the writings of Andrea Dworking and Catharine MacKinnon, and dismissed as too radical by moderate feminists.

At least three sequences deserve a special mention. Firstly, the way the director breaks the fourth wall and invites the audience into the movie towards the end of the film. Secondly, when the females subvert the infamous Jewish blessing “Dear God who has not made me a woman” in their favour. Thirdly, when one of the girls find a very unorthodox use for a chicken egg. You’ll know what I’m talking about if you’ve seen Nagisa Oshima’s Realm of the Senses (1976). Otherwise, just use your imagination and I’m sure you can work it out just as well.

The fact that the director is a “pendulous” human being (quoting the vocabulary from the movie itself) could come across as a blasphemous (blaspheminine?) attack on female integrity, and on the overall identity of the movie. Bruce LaBruce confessed that at times he thought: “why am I doing this”. In reality, The Misandrists is an elegant and colourful tribute to feminism, if from a male perspective. LaBruce confessed in an interview with DMovies last year that working with so many women was a novelty, and that he “let the girls guide themselves, and do things the way they would do it” while making the film. The director is indeed very respectful of the females, yet his gaze is still pervasive, and this ultimately remains a very masculine Bruce LaBruce movie.

The Misandrists premiered at the Berlinale in early 2017, when this piece was originally written. It is showing in September at the Raindance Film Festival of London and then in November at Fringe!. It’s out on DVD on April 30th (2018).