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Geoff (Murray Melvin), who moves in with her and looks after her
during her pregnancy. I use the novelettish term "fellow-spirit" inten–
tionally, because I think it helps to establish the idyllic frame of reference.
The story is about a little mock paradise that is lost: the mother comes
back and throws Geoff out, but Jo has had her taste of the honey of
sweet companionship.
A Taste of Honey
is a fairy tale set in modern
industrial ugliness. Geoff in this story is a combination Peter Pan and
homemaking Wendy who had to have a pretend baby, and he's a fairy
godmother as well. The girl J
0
is herself a Peter Pan figure: stubborn,
independent, capering and whimsical, ignoring most of the world, moved
only by what interests her. The background music--children's songs–
further aligns J
0
and Geoff with the world and the charm of children.
Their pleasures are innocent and carefree; by contrast, the grownups are
almost all horrible objects, sexual in a nasty, grotesque way.
Perhaps the greatest charm of
A Taste of Honey,
and this is a
distinctively modern charm, is in the poetry of role confusion. The
mother and daughter don't have a parent-child relationship; they are
more like bickering siblings. And J
0
and Geoff are not like woman
and man but like non-bickering siblings, Geoff the older sister looking
after Jo, the disorderly younger sister, in what is a bit of a parody of
the maternal relationship Jo has not previously experienced. These role
confusions are presented by Shelagh Delaney with simple directness and
without any moralizing.
What's the matter with the film? Perhaps I can get at this indirectly.
Have you ever, after an exhausting all-night party or conversation, taken
a walk at dawn? It's cleansing and beautiful and you decide that you'll
change your way of life, get up early, breathe the fresh air. Well, the
movie is about the way the morning air feels for those who naturally
get up in it, but it appears to be made by people who stayed up
all night and then, tired and hung over,
discovered
the morning air
and thought it was a great thing and more people should know about it.
It's not as if it were done in Hollywood-you may have heard about
the Hollywood producer who wanted to make the film with Audrey
Hepburn as J
0
and give it a typical American upbeat ending by having
the child born dead. (With Audrey Hepburn
could
it be born alive?)
You have to be familiar with Hollywood's curious codes to understand
that killing off the little bastard squares everything; and the heroine,
having suffered, would then be redeemed. This film doesn't attempt to
lick the material at the Hollywood level, but the director simply can't
find the innocence or the imagination or the style that the boisterous,
contagious material deserves and
needs.
The performers are good, but the
