A Kind of Loving · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Begin with the long shot, because Schlesinger keeps returning to it. A figure made small against the industrial North: terraced roofs falling away below a viaduct, an overcast sky gone grainy, smoke-darkened brick. Vic Brown is down there somewhere in his good draughtsman's shoes, and Denys Coop's camera sits too far back to read his face. You watch him the way you watch weather. That distance is the film's first real idea, and it happens to be a Deleuzian one.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze split cinema in two. Most films before the war ran on what he called the movement-image: a character perceives a situation, feels the pressure of it, and acts to change it. Crime, then capture. Love thwarted, then love won. The cut serves the chain; action resolves the situation. This is the grammar of nearly every story you grew up on. Deleuze's claim was that around the 1940s this grammar broke, and characters started appearing who could perceive perfectly well but could no longer act adequately on what they saw. He called this the crisis of the action-image, and A Kind of Loving is one of its quietest, most domestic English instances.

Watch what Vic does not do. He drifts toward Ingrid at the office, half-wanting her; he sleeps with her; she becomes pregnant; he marries her without love and moves into her mother's house. At no point does he act in the older cinematic sense — no decision lands, no situation is mastered. Alan Bates plays him as genuinely passive, neither the charismatic rebel of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning nor a clean victim you can pity. The achievement, and it is Schlesinger's specific invention here, is to make ambivalence itself hold the screen. The drama is not what Vic chooses but his incapacity to choose, the way life arrives and he absorbs it.

When action drains out of an image, Deleuze says, something else floods in: the character becomes a seer (un voyant), someone who looks and endures rather than intervenes. Vic is exactly this. Coop's observational exteriors, the high angles, the figures dwarfed by landscape, keep putting us at the watching distance, and inside that distance the ordinary world starts presenting itself for its own sake. Deleuze's word for these moments is opsigns and sonsigns — pure optical and sound situations, where the image is no longer a cue for the next move but a thing simply registered. A wet pavement. The grain of the sky. The Rothwell parlour with its three-piece suite, its television, its net curtains, every ornament a small reproach. Thora Hird's monstrous, recognisable Mrs. Rothwell turns that front room into a near-Gothic chamber of respectability, and the camera, shooting it close and airless, asks us only to take it in.

Those interiors are what Deleuze would call any-space-whatevers — spaces that have stopped being mere settings for action and become charged affective fields, fragmented or void or suffocating. Note the contrast Coop builds: the observational openness outdoors against a confining intimacy inside, which physicalises Vic's narrowing options without a line of dialogue. The film carries its meaning in surfaces because its people are too reticent, or too trapped, to say it.

The editing belongs to the same logic. Roger Cherrill cuts for legibility and uses ellipsis around the courtship and its sexual turning points, eliding the very events a conventional romance would dramatise. Deleuze noticed that the crisis brings weak links — slackened causality, scenes joined loosely rather than driven. And the rhythm is patient to the point of discomfort: long passages of waiting, awkwardness, tedium allowed to play at near real duration. This is dead time (temps mort), the everyday held on screen until you feel its weight. Most films cut it away. A Kind of Loving is largely made of it.

Place this in the history it comes from. The British New Wave domesticated Italian neorealism — Bicycle Thieves above all, with its undramatic incident in an ordinary man's life, shot on location with a gaze that refuses to judge. André Bazin had argued that neorealism's ethic was respect for the fact, for the ambiguity of the real left un-resolved by the plot. Schlesinger, who came from documentary and made Terminus about a railway station, inherits that ethic directly. The craft debts are concrete: Room at the Top gave him the trap-marriage built from a regional novel; A Taste of Honey gave Coop the handheld, available-light grammar of grimy northern townscapes; The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner showed how expressive ellipsis could fold into realist material.

What did the film do to cinema? It found, inside sober social realism, the seer that the European art film was discovering at the same moment — only it kept him in a Lancashire drawing office instead of an Antonioni piazza. The refusal of catharsis is the proof. The ending offers neither tragedy nor romance, only two flawed people choosing to go on, an accommodation rather than a fulfilment, which is what the title told you from the start. Schlesinger would carry this watchful, object-eloquent style forward into Billy Liar, Darling and Sunday Bloody Sunday.

So rewatch it for the distances. Notice how often you are placed too far away to intervene, exactly where Vic is. The film hands you his condition: to see clearly and be unable to act, and to make a kind of life out of that anyway.