Writer and Director: Sam Mendes
Two big personal movies have been the pick of the BFI London Film Festival in 2021 and 2022. Last year it was Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, a stirring tribute to his childhood at the start of the Troubles, a cinematic masterpiece in elegant black and white and filled with technical movie references. This time it is Sam Mendes who looks back to his youth in the beautiful Empire of Light with a story that draws on his experience of family mental health issues in the 1980s set in a classic cinema where he learned to love the silver screen.
Not a direct autobiography but certainly drawing on Mendes’ own life, when Stephen joins the team at the Empire cinema in Margate, he gets to know a varied group of people including youngster Janice with a punk aesthetic, projectionist Norman who cherishes his craft, fellow worked Neil who sees everything and particularly deputy manager Hilary with whom he forms a deep connection. Although they couldn’t be more different, Stephen and Hilary’s friendship is something she comes to need.
Mendes is a master of blending scale and intimacy, able to tell personal stories about individual lives yet still command great sweeps of history at the same time. Although Empire of Light is a more intimate film than much of the director’s other theatre and screen work, it elegantly captures the spirit of the age in a seaside town where there is little to hope for but much to aspire to. The surrounding context of Thatcher’s Britain, racism, far-right politics, mental health and male aggression is perhaps not as well explored as it might be, but the film finds its strength in its quite depiction of a changing world that may not reach Margate.
It is also a very tender film, a real examination of a friendship told from Stephen’s perspectives as a relative outsider, first to the cinema crew and later in feeling his ‘otherness’. His growing attachment to Hilary is sensitively charted, first as a sexual encounter and later as something deeper that becomes essential to them both. Mendes’ management of this is full of meaning while the ensemble in the Empire cinema feels like a group of people thrown together but who care for and support one another.
The scenario references Annie Baker’s play The Flick set amongst a group of cinema colleagues with only the business of the day for conversation, and Mendes applies a similar simplicity to his own screenplay where so much is said without unnecessary or sentimental dialogue. There are moments of grandeur of course, giving Hilary some uneven behaviour when she stops taking her medication and when the little cinema hosts a glitzy premiere, but like Baker’s work the real meaning in Empire of Light is in the ordinary moments as the characters go about their day.
Mendes also finds scale in the vistas, not especially of the coastline but within the cinema itself, the enchanting disused top floor bar where Hilary and Stephen hide away feels like a vast, unknown country waiting to be discovered yet laden with memory. Light, be it neon signs, the beam from a projector or the twilight flooding through the alternately coloured windows have been characteristic of Mendes’ work since Skyfall and these acres of light give the film its expanse, chiming with the theme that there are whole worlds in the cinema. Meanwhile, Roger Deakins’ cinematography plays with tone to reflect drab routine in public foyers and the staff break room, but a glorious richness within the cinema itself.
Mendes describes Micheal Ward as a movie star in the making and he’s not wrong. His Stephen carries the film, becoming its heart and soul as Ward presents a shy young man finding confidence to become someone else. Olivia Coleman mutes Hilary’s excesses, showing a woman subdued and held back by her medication, only a glimpse of exuberance and pain when she stops taking it. The remaining principle cast members are a wonderful ensemble with Toby Jones as Norman, Tom Brooke as Neil and Colin Firth as a lecherous cinema manager.
It’s difficult to follow a film as consuming, pacey and technically adventurous as 1917 but Empire of Light is a worthy successor with its tribute to cinema and the ache of losing something important. There is much to admire in this restrained but wonderfully subtle film about finding someone to care for.
Empire of Light is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2022.
