“Movies deal in mythic landscapes,” says Sam Mendes. It’s a statement that seems incongruous at first. The director’s latest film, Empire of Light, is set in 1980s England, and, let’s face it, a grey, windy English seaside isn’t usually what comes to mind when thinking about the fantastical worlds that films can transport us to.
In Empire of Light, though, the seaside setting glows with spirit and history. Mendes and his collaborator, lauded cinematographer Roger Deakins, deftly illuminate the quiet beauty of England’s north Kent coast. The shifting light of Margate’s sky and its sandy beaches serve as the backdrop for Mendes’ profoundly human story. Throughout the film, we watch as this landscape, the grand old art deco cinema and the film’s characters all come to life.
When we first meet Hilary, a duty manager at the Empire Cinema played by Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman, she is desaturated. Lonely and struggling with her mental health, she seems to be fading into her workplace: a worn-down cinema that’s in danger of becoming a nostalgic time capsule of the past.
Enter Stephen. Played by Top Boy’s Micheal Ward, he’s an optimistic Black British man who begins working as a ticket collector. His brightness casts Hilary’s life and the Empire in a new light, as though someone is fixing a broken dimmer switch in the lush, wood-panelled lobby and the warmth of its glory days has returned.
Deakins’ cinematography and the talents of the film’s actors work in harmony here. Watching Colman and Ward, as well as Colin Firth and Toby Jones excelling in their supporting roles, you’re never distracted by complicated framing or elaborate, artificial-feeling sets. While it’s Deakins who has been nominated for an Oscar for the 16th time (he has won twice) for best cinematography for Empire of Light, he insists the accolade is “for everybody”.
“The look of the film is created by the production designer, the wardrobe, costume and actors,” Deakins says. “It’s so hard to separate all the amazing elements.”
The Empire Cinema, in which much of Empire of Light’s action takes place, feels authentic and slightly eroded – as if the salty sea air has worn it away from the inside. This is a major feat from production designer Mark Tildesley, who scouted Dreamland, a former cinema and ballroom attached to a funfair on Margate’s seafront, prompting Mendes to rewrite his script to take advantage of the building’s charms.
The disused space needed a lot of work; Tildesley and his team put in new furniture, rebuilt art deco bathrooms, and installed new material on the proscenium arch, before then ageing the sets to be period-appropriate. Lit and captured deftly by Deakins, the space is a pleasure for the eyes. Each sequence in the main cinema is a rich, red-velveted visual treat – it’s impossible to tell that it had actually been converted into a pea-green bingo hall before Tildesley arrived on the scene.
“There’s an extraordinary art deco glory to it,” Tildesley says. “There’s a sense that it was built in the 1930s and now it’s 1980 and it’s beginning to creak and crumble. It’s an analogy with the story: the lead characters are weathered and broken people, and they need care and healing and mending.”
In the quiet, mythic space of the Empire, we watch as Hilary and Stephen tentatively explore a friendship, which soon turns romantic. Colman speaks about Hilary and her affecting relationship with Stephen with tenderness, as does Ward. Mendes has assembled some of Britain’s finest production talent and his actors are equally skilled at bringing out the beauty of their unassuming characters.
Through Hilary and Stephen’s respective experiences, Mendes explores mental illness, ageing, sexual exploitation, shifting social mores and rising racial violence in Thatcher-era Britain. “You’re always looking for a point where the past becomes somehow bigger in scale, and greater in theme, and more fabled than the present,” Mendes says. “Looking back now, this period in England seemed to me one where the intersection of racial politics and music and movies was particularly special and unusual.”
It’s a tangled context, but through the collective efforts of Empire of Light’s cast and creatives, it doesn’t overwhelm. As Hilary and Stephen do throughout the film, audiences can return again and again to the subtle beauty of the Empire cinema and the momentary escape from the turbulent outside world it provides.
