Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 18 October 2012

issue 20 October 2012

The film started ten minutes ago, says the man as he hands us our prebooked tickets. Another young man shows us down the stairs and through doors marked ‘Screen 2’ into darkness. There’s no light coming from the screen and it’s so dark in there I can’t see a thing. Fortunately the usher turns on one of those muffled torches and I slavishly follow his weak green light until it stops and hovers, presumably at the end of a row with vacant seats in it. By using his circle of light as a rough guide to where he is standing, then calculating from this where his ear might be, I lean towards it to whisper my gratitude, and accidentally kiss him on the eyelid.

The film is an Austrian subtitled film called What Is Love (without the question mark). The synopsis on the London Film Festival website says it is a meditation on our relationships with each other and with God.

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