I was 17 years old, I’d just passed my driving test and I would sometimes skip school to drive to Manchester in my mum’s car. I’d look around the upmarket shops and restaurants with a kind of detached fascination—city life was highly exotic to me. On one occasion when Manchester’s weather—I figured it seemed arty enough to fulfil my excruciatingly poetic aspirations at the time. I was about to experience a piece of cinema that would ingratiate me into a whole new genre of inner feeling—an emotion which I knew was there but couldn’t quite locate. I’d describe it as ambient melancholia, like a gauze over everything which softens and darkens the world but doesn’t smudge it out entirely. It’s an openhearted state in which the blinds are angled steeply to diffuse incoming light and spare you any shock.
