T H E N A I V E F I L M M A K E R

This week a visit home has seen me watching a lot of Kitchen Sink Dramas. Films studied very briefly over this last year for their approach to social realism. They in many ways appear to be Britain’s very own sixties answer to Parasite. Addressing the class struggles and other difficulties faced by angry young men, often educated and bright people unable to better their own lives because of the absurd odds placed against them by society at the time.

These films by today’s standards sometimes follow very unsympathetic characters. Look Back In Anger’s protagonist Jimmy Porter for example is a man that the audience should be able to relate to, having worked hard to achieve a university education only to be told there is no place for him outside of a modest sweet stall. However his Streetcar Named Desire bullying of his wife turns (for the gentler audience at least) this critique of British class into a very sad film about a woman making the wrong decision to reconcile with her abusive husband. (It is notable that the sequel to the original play retroactively acknowledged this with Alison no longer around and her daughter with Jimmy leaving at the end of the play).

Likewise while Neo Noir meets Kitchen Sink Realism in the fantastic Room at the Top. It eventually becomes too hard to sympathise with Joe Lampton’s inner turmoil when he has treated so many people as badly as the ruling class had treated him.

While kitchen sink realism successfully and masterfully told the story of a less heroic but more realistic breed of nuanced characters, they were not always likeable.

But far more likeable were the faces of Tony Richardson’s “A Taste of Honey”. Rita Tushingham was awarded the BAFTA honour of “Most Promising Newcomer” for her portrayal of the bright and talented Jo, a girl who despite her young age has little hope or motivation in her life, something that can most likely be attributed to her mother’s neglect and apathy towards raising her daughter as they live a life of dodging rent collectors and in Helen’s case abandoning her daughter in the pursuit of less than respectable bachelors.

The film follows significant character growth for Jo from the time her mother abandons her to wed a man of questionable character. Forced to find a new home and with no motivation to continue her schooling she rents a room with money earned from work in a shoe shop where she meets cinema’s original gay best friend Geoffrey; a fellow outsider with whom she sees for the first time a life that she can be enthusiastic about.

They turn their rundown studio apartment into a comfortable albeit bohemian home and live their lives with a kind of carefree poetry despite the growing concerns surrounding them. When together they forget about Jo’s pregnancy, the hatred Geoffrey would have received for his sexuality and the sniggers of Salford as they make their unique union work. They are simply happy to frolic and declare themselves as “Bloody Marvellous”.

It is one of the few kitchen sink dramas that seem to have much sense of hope in them. At a time when being a single mother was a societal death sentence Jo seems to have everything worked out, despite her mood swings into deep depressions and panic attacks over what could go wrong, the audience knows Geoffrey will be there and the talented young pair might actually be able to make a life that works for them.

Of course a happy film about a bohemian pair of friends does not match the description of kitchen sink drama and its only a matter of time before the world collapses on both the protagonists and the audience alike. This is of course as a result of the return of the audience least favourite Helen!

Helen is in many ways representative of what Jo may become, at the beginning of the film she is a single mother who frequently makes clear her regret at having become a single mother. She claims she wants better for Jo but fails to provide a life even resembling decent for Jo as she is forced to suffer for her mother’s failings. Unable to fit in at school because of her tumultuous home life she fails to get the education that may have been her ticket out destitution and notably her life only improves when she has been abandoned by her mother, not before having been compelled into repeating her mother’s mistakes when she falls pregnant by a man who is likely the first person to treat her with any form of affection. It is not unnoteworthy that it happens after a crushing argument with her mother as destroyed any self esteem she may have left.

It might have seemed inevitable that the life Jo was building with Geoffrey was doomed. However,  many might have assumed that the problem (as it was in most Kitchen Sinks Dramas) would be society. Perhaps the locals who would not take kindly to an unmarried mother, a mixed race infant and a gay father figure. Or maybe the same social services of 1966’s Georgy Girl; Who would not stand for a baby being raised in such an abnormal circumstance.

But instead Jo must once again pay for the sins of her mother, a woman who’s first real show of concern for her daughter is conveniently timed with her own being thrown out of her husband’s house. Once again exploiting her daughter’s vulnerability to her own ends and expelling the one person who has treated her daughter with any kindness. As Geoffrey packs his bags the audience is left to watch her daughter being punished for the sins of her mother, a woman who was most likely in the past let down by the failings of her own parents and a society that would not give her a chance. Jo is as a result doomed to repeat the life that she lead, her situation now not improved from the film’s opening and infinitely more complicated.

Audiences are divided by the ending, some believing the sparkler to be representative of a brighter future, which I like to believe is wholly possible as she is reunited with her mother and might resolve to do better by her child and make the best of a bad situation.

Although others might put it down to Jo taking solitude in a piece of childish enjoyment before she is forever forced into the role of a mother with the world against her.