A ‘broken’ mother, a taboo romance: This film is no Cinema Paradiso

By Stephanie Bunbury

Olivia Colman in Empire of Light. Credit:AP

Sam Mendes is clearly anxious that his film is being read the wrong way. Empire of Light is set in a tatty British seaside town in the ’80s, where the town’s grand old picture house is struggling. Half the cinema has been closed and the remaining auditorium is hanging on to viability with a rotating program of comedies and a brisk trade in Maltesers, catering to a trickle of regulars.

Among a staff of eccentrics, it falls to Norman, the intense projectionist, to speak of the transformative power of cinema, but when Stephen (Micheal Ward) starts work as a junior usher, projection assistant and whatever else he is required to do, he is clearly already feeling that joy. As a black kid in what is now right-wing provocateur Nigel Farage’s stamping ground, he finds a safe haven.

For Mendes, however, the heart of the film is Olivia Colman’s mad, sad Hilary, who presides over the ticket office but professes no interest in the films screened at the top of the staircase. A middle-aged woman racked by a recurring mental illness, her rages, anxieties and intermittent forced stays in grim psychiatric institutions echo those of Mendes’ own mother.

Mendes, 57, has a string of directorial triumphs on stage and screen behind him, ranging from American Beauty to the Bond films to 1917. This is the first script he has written drawing on his own life, in which his mother’s afflictions were central. He would not know, for example, if she’d still be there when he got home from school.

Diector Sam Mendes, centre, with his stars Michael Ward and Olivia Colman.Credit:Misan Harriman

“I feel it could easily be misunderstood as a sort of Cinema Paradiso-like romance about movies,” he says. “Well, I wish, that’s a great movie and everything – but that’s not what the film is, at its core. At its core it’s about being an outcast and broken.”

Sometimes, however, it is impossible to argue with what the public wants. Since the film was unveiled at the Toronto Film Festival last year, the most enthusiastic reviews have come from critics and audiences who have found joy in its celebration of cinema as both bolthole and an affirmation of community. Or perhaps that should be communities: the audience sitting in the dark being one, and the ragtag staff bickering amiably in the basement tearoom as the other.

It isn’t all cosiness – Colin Firth’s cantankerous theatre manager is also a sexual predator – but after years of COVID and working from home, so much visible togetherness pulls at the heartstrings.

“They are, as you say, a little family,” says Colman. “They look out for each other. There is camaraderie, there’s laughter. I think we all used to think ‘Oh God, I’d love to work from home’, but then in lockdown we realised ‘No, I miss people, I miss talking, sharing, the nuances you can see in someone’s eyes’. We’ve all missed that. And I think, after lockdown, that’s partly what Sam was thinking of.”

As the various characters’ stories emerge from this dusty old world, so does the plot thread of a burgeoning affair between unstable Hilary and insecure Stephen. She is 25 years older, but the characters never talk about that.

“There is camaraderie, there’s laughter … we’ve all missed that,” says Olivia Colman about Empire of Light.Credit:AP

“I think how we felt is that they sort of didn’t see each other’s ages,” says Colman. “I think Hilary felt this sunshine suddenly came into her world, this bright, intelligent, vibrant creature walked into the cinema and she just couldn’t look anywhere else. He’s going to find someone more suitable, but at that moment and in that place they’re the only ones who can see each other.”

Ward agrees. Both characters are lonely; Stephen’s few friends have gone away to college, leaving him in this hollowed-out seaside resort with his mother for company. “But he doesn’t really connect with other people in the cinema like how he does with Hilary. Sometimes that’s more important than age – or race. I think we’re forgetting about race here, but in that time for a black man to be with a white woman might have been just as bad as an older woman with a younger man, do you know what I’m saying?”

At 25, Ward is too young to remember skinheads. He grew up in Romsey, Essex. There were almost no people of colour and everyone was poor. “I never really saw colour as a thing.” He understands race differently now. There are some difficult scenes in Empire of Light, including a horrifying moment when the local toughs smash down the cinema’s plate-glass door to get to Stephen. Ward didn’t find that especially troubling, he says; he just went into automatic self-defence mode.

What upset him was seeing Hilary welcome an old white regular just after he has tossed a gratuitous racist insult at Stephen. That was a betrayal. “Surely you can step in and say, ‘Yo, that’s not right. You need to leave’,” he said in an interview with Indiewire. He understood Mendes to be suggesting a different way white people could react to each other in response to racism. “I think that’s what Sam was saying within that scene. I always want to do work where there is a certain message involved, a positive message. That’s been a great part of telling this story.”

Rising star Michael Ward as Stephen in Empire of Light. Credit:AP

If Colman is now a national treasure, her excellence in any role expected, Ward is the film’s shooting star. He came to Britain from Jamaica with his widowed mother and sister when he was four years old, eventually getting a scholarship to go to drama school. He was still a student when he came to sudden fame as the lead in Netflix’s revival of Top Boy, a series about drug gangs produced by rap superstar Drake that won Ward a Rising Star Award at the 2020 BAFTAs. But he says he never thought he’d be doing a film with Mendes. Doing press for Empire of Light has made him think about his own relationship with cinema.

“We used to have non-school uniform day and then go to our local cinema. We’d watch a lot of dance films” – he remembers the Step Up series – “and we’d be coming out of the cinema doing street dance; some people would be popping and locking, some people would be doing, like, spins and stuff. Obviously you weren’t going there dancing on the way, so you leave with an experience you wouldn’t have had if you didn’t go and see the film. So that’s my earliest experience of cinema, that it can really affect people. And that was exciting.”

Mendes says cinema gave him the opportunity to escape. “As an only child with a very troubled home life, it was a healing place. And subsequently, it has been a place where ad hoc families have welcomed me. I still feel that about both film and theatre, that what I’m doing is creating a family I never had. And because I lost myself in stories. They gave me a life. And now my life is making stories.”

There is a sense, wrote one critic in response to Empire of Light, in which all good films are about the magic of cinema, so maybe Mendes has no reason to insist this film is about anything else. You don’t need to be an outcast to want to be told good stories. We all want that.

Empire of Light opens on March 2.

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