A Taste of Honey (1961)
Jo: I hope to be dead and buried by the time I reach your age. Just think, you've been living for forty years.
Helen: I know, I must be a biological phenomenon.
Jo: You don't look forty. You look a sort of well-preserved sixty.
Helen: Oh, you cheeky monkey!
What continued to dance about my noggin while watching this was just how beautifully shot this film is of such a dirty, industrialized city as Manchester England.
Mirroring the story written by 18 yr old, Shelagh Delaney, that had been made into a stage play before being adapted to film by Tony Richardson.
A story that would, at first hearing, could be just as brutally harsh as the location. But, like the filming of the squalor architect, there is something quite beautiful in the telling of a teenage girl, her irresponsible/self-absorbed mother, the short fling the girl has with a sailor on leave, (who happens to be black), being abandoned by said mother when her latest man demands she must decide between him and her, to finding a "home" when she welcomes a gay gent into the hovel she acquired and soon after, realizes she's pregnant.
All of which was quite the Taboo picnic basket for its time.
All of which is given a moment in the sun as it were.
No politics, no getting trampled beneath Social Expectations or heat-fueled debates regarding Morality.
It is also NOT glamorized, finding the silver lining, making lemonade out of lemons, the sun will come out tomorrow drivel.
Just life.
Every day, as is, life.
Our leading lady, Jo is no innocent waif out of a Charles Dickens novel to be used and abused. But a head strong, independent young woman who finds a moment of love with a very good man who cannot stay. And an even kinder one who's domestic flair puts her own mother (who is not cruel, just more involved in her own pleasure) to shame.
It is. . . well, just what its called: A taste of honey.
BRAVO to whomever nominated this for me
And THANK YOU