A Taste of Honey · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the walk. Jo moving home through Salford — past the canal water, the latticed ironwork of the bridges, the fairground neon smearing against a grey sky. Nothing is decided in these stretches. She isn't heading somewhere that will change her life; she's just heading. Walter Lassally finds a real beauty in the industrial desolation, but the beauty doesn't lead anywhere, and that refusal is the whole film in miniature.

Gilles Deleuze gave us a precise way to name what has happened here. In classical cinema — what he calls the movement-image — a person perceives a situation and acts to change it; action resolves the situation, and the cutting serves that chain of cause and effect. A Taste of Honey is built on the quiet collapse of that contract. Jo perceives everything: her mother's selfishness, Jimmy's leaving, the pregnancy, Geoffrey's tenderness and its fragility. She can do almost nothing about any of it. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image — the moment, around 1948, when European cinema stopped trusting that a character could act its way out of a situation. What's left is a figure who watches and endures. He named her the seer, the voyant. The dossier's own description of Tushingham's Jo says it better than theory does: "an intelligence making continuous small adjustments to conditions she did not choose." That is the seer, exactly.

Watch how the film is shaped and you find Deleuze's symptoms of the crisis laid out almost as a checklist. It moves in what he called the balade-form, the trip or stroll that transforms nothing. Helen leaves, returns, leaves again. Jimmy arrives, gives warmth, disappears. Geoffrey moves in, builds a working home, and is expelled the moment Helen comes back. The episodic, picaresque drift the dossier describes is Deleuze's dispersive situation: many people, loosely tied, none of them bending the story toward resolution. And the links between them are weak links — Antony Gibbs's editing privileges mood over strict continuity, working in ellipsis and tonal discontinuity, so causality goes slack. Scenes follow emotional logic, not expository logic. The plot doesn't tighten; it breathes.

This lineage is worth tracing, because the film didn't invent its method — it inherited it. Deleuze's first seers were Italian: the boy trailing his father through Rome in Bicycle Thieves, the old man and the maid in Umberto D doing nothing in particular in a kitchen while the camera simply stays. Richardson takes De Sica's grammar — track a marginal person through real working-class streets, build pressure by behavioral accumulation rather than plot mechanics — and applies it to Jo's daily improvisations across Salford. From Truffaut's 400 Blows he takes the picaresque structure of a young misfit failed by every institution, ending on an image that refuses to redeem. Honey makes good on that refusal: no rescue, no lesson, Jo alone with the baby's future unaddressed.

The heart of the film is its dead time — temps mort, Deleuze's word for the stretches where nothing advances the action and the everyday is simply held. The middle section, Jo and Geoffrey in the damp flat, painting it, dancing in it, bickering: this is the quietest passage and also the most alive. By classical standards nothing is happening. By the standards of the time-image, everything is — two people who have nothing are making a provisional kind of home, and the film trusts us to feel that without a plot to carry it. These are what Deleuze called pure optical situations, where a character (and we) can only look and listen.

The spaces hold their own charge. Lassally's industrial expanses — the coast, the park, the canal — open up and seem to promise freedom, but the narrative never delivers it. Deleuze called this the any-space-whatever, the espace quelconque: a place that has stopped being a mere setting for action and become a carrier of feeling in itself. The dossier names the exact gap Lassally calibrates, between visual openness and social constraint. The openness is real and so is the cage.

And then there is the body. Tushingham's Jo is a study in what Deleuze called the cinema of the body — the everyday body carrying duration in its postures and gestures. Her angular movements, her way of holding herself against the world, register a whole condition that no speech states. Set against her is Helen, always in transit: pubs, doorways, hotel rooms, never settled, never committed to a place. Jo's flat, however damp, has a stubborn thereness. That contrast is what Deleuze called the gest — a posture that exposes a social relation. Who gets to stay still, and who is always passing through, is here a fact about class, drawn in bodies rather than argued in dialogue.

What did the film do to film? It carried the observational eye of Free Cinema — the live-recorded jazz club of Richardson's own Momma Don't Allow — into dramatic fiction, and proved a British picture could follow an unredeemed working-class life without moralizing it into a lesson. Watch it again for the moments when Jo simply watches. The film's wager is that watching is enough, and it wins.