Tag: Lesley Manville

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:

Phantom Thread

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

American director Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film to be set in England ostensibly concerns a ladies’ dress designer to the rich and famous in the 1950s. It moves between London where Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) works and the house in the country where he relaxes. It also moves between the obsessive, creative designer and his efficient, business-minded sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) and Alma (Vicky Krieps), the woman he meets and comes slowly but surely to depend on as his model, muse and partner. Beneath the surface, it’s about relationships, manipulation and control.

There’s also the two siblings’ long dead mother with whom Reynolds – basically a mother’s boy – is obsessed. So much so that, when he falls ill (possibly fatally), he sees her standing by the wall of his bedroom and speaks to her (she doesn’t respond). We know it’s her because of a photograph seen earlier: the apparition gives away no more information than the photograph. “Always carry it with you”, he tells Alma on their first date. He likes sewing things – photographs coins, messages – into clothing. His mother’s picture is sewn into his coat lining.

When I say first date… Well, Reynolds wines and dines Alma, a very ordinary waitress with a slight German accent who’s working at a small village hotel, then takes her back to his house in the country… so that he can try out material on her torso and start designing a dress for her. Later, he gets out his tape measure just in time for Cyril to turn up and write down Alma’s measurements as Reynolds calls them out.

The narrative parades a bewildering array of House of Woodcock clientele, from fans who would give anything to wear one of his dresses (swiftly dismissed from the Woodcock restaurant table by Cyril) to royalty with entourage, from a well-paying but ultimately self-loathing drunk to Alma the muse. Reynolds and Alma remove a commissioned dress from the drunk’s body as she sleeps her stupor off. “Not worthy of the House of Woodcock”, says Alma.

Also on show is the dress design, manufacture and modelling display process, complete with a team of seamstresses who, when Reynolds falls ill and collapses onto a dress, have to work late in order to repair it for delivery abroad the next morning.

By far the most interesting aspect of the film, however, is the interplay between the three main characters. Reynolds can be stubborn, telling Alma she’s making too much noise buttering her toast at breakfast which destroys the rest of his working day. Alma obsessively loves Reynolds and desires to have him and his time on her own terms. As such, she is more than his match. As too is Cyril. A power struggle between the two women is inevitable. Even more interesting, picking mushrooms in the country, Alma decides that the only way to get Reynolds under her control may be to poison him, something with which Reynolds, once he realises what she’s up to, readily complies.

So although this has all the trappings of a film about fashion and clothes design (specifically dresses) and more than satisfies on that level, and while it’s also beautifully paced and photographed and boasts a fantastic period score by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame, the film plays out less as a 1950s period costume piece and more as a drama about some very dark interpersonal subject matter indeed. It feels less epic than certain of Anderson’s earlier offerings (Boogie Nights/1997, Magnolia/1999, The Master/2012) and closer to his more intimate debut Hard Eight a.k.a. Sydney (1996) and his other Day-Lewis collaboration There Will Be Blood (2012). Hard Eight shows a lowlife US world and Blood a self-made man. However, Thread’s characters are most definitely English (or German immigrant in Alma’s case) and part of the circus surrounding and servicing the privileged classes.

We’d love to see Anderson dealing with something that gets under the skin of ordinary, non-privileged Brits rather than the well-heeled types so often portrayed in US and indeed British dramas. For now, though, the slow-burning Phantom Thread will do very nicely, thank you.

Phantom Thread is out in the UK on Friday, February 2nd. The film has received six Oscar nominations. On Netflix in January 2020.