A TASTE OF HONEY, march 6

In Britain of the 1950s divisions of class were far more rigid than they are today.
The 'new wave' films and the sources that inspired them gave a voice to a
working-class that was for the first time gaining some economic power.

Tony Richardson belongs to that generation of British film directors which includes
Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, all of them university-trained middle-class
artists who were sympathetic to the conditions of the working classes and
determined to use cinema as a means of personal expression, in line with the goals
of the Free Cinema movement.

Taking audiences out of the studio and into the streets, where the real stories
were, Richardson and his partners favored realism above all: young, fresh actors,
location shooting, and narratives featuring controversial subjects such as
interracial dating and sex, homosexuality and class.

This 1961 film is based on an avant-garde play of the 1950s Britain. It talked
frankly about the taboo subjects of pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy, abortion,
and adoption from the woman's point-of-view .

"If audiences throughout Britain were stunned by the in-your-face attitude of
'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning', they were left somewhere between tears and a
sense of hope with 'A Taste of Honey',an important film in the history of British
Cinema."

PLOT IN SHORT
Jo is a seventeen-year-old and appears to be a loner. She lives with her mother
Helen who is constantly involved in affairs with men much younger in age. Jo
develops a rather positive take on everything unfavourable that is happening in her
life. She keeps herself busy mostly by sketching and drawing.
She meets Jimmy who she falls in love with, just before he is to go away on a long
voyage. Jo’s mother abandons her after finding Peter, a rich and much younger lover.
It is here that Jo meets Geoffrey, a kind-hearted gay man. Geoffrey and Jo get along
well and share a very similar optimistic take on life despite all its hardships. Jo
eventually discovers that she is pregnant, a shocking result of the last night she
spent with Jimmy. Though scared at first, Jo decides to keep the baby...








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