Film reviews: Empire of Light | Till

Set in a fading art deco cinema on the south coast of England in the early 1980s, Empire of Light stars Olivia Colman as a depressed front-of-house manager who falls for a much younger Black co-worker. It’s beautiful but predictable, writes Alistair Harkness
Olivia Colman in Empire of Light PIC: Parisa Taghizadeh, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures / © 2022 20th Century StudiosOlivia Colman in Empire of Light PIC: Parisa Taghizadeh, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures / © 2022 20th Century Studios
Olivia Colman in Empire of Light PIC: Parisa Taghizadeh, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures / © 2022 20th Century Studios

Empire of Light (15) **

Till (15) ***

Sam Mendes follows up his multi-Oscar-nominated 1917 with Empire of Light, a small-scale love letter to cinema that frequently falls into the biggest trap associated with this mini-sub-genre: it’s not something you necessarily want to spend time watching in a cinema. Starring Olivia Colman as Hilary, the manically depressed front-of-house manager of a fading art deco picture house on the south coast of England in the early 1980s, the film takes shape around her burgeoning relationship with a young Black usher called Stephen (Michael Ward), who’s taken a job at the cinema while figuring out what to do with his life after his application to study architecture at university is turned down.

As the film opens, Hilary has recently had some time off work to recover from a breakdown that her largely supportive colleagues only talk about in hushed voices. Not that it would necessarily matter if she did overhear them. Numbed out on lithium, she barely registers the degrading sexual acts her married boss (an odiously stuffy Colin Firth) expects her to perform on him during office hours. But Steven’s arrival buoys her spirits; they have chemistry and their relationship quickly escalates into a sexual one, a plot development that Mendes explores with an admirable lack of comment on either the age or racial difference.

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That’s not to say race isn’t primary theme in the film. The way the characters subtly adjust their behaviour when they know other people can see them reflects the blatant prejudices of the era, though Mendes uses the relationship to work in a more dramatic clash with the National Front, the surging prominence of which literally runs headlong into film’s the nostalgia for the everyday grandeur of the picture palaces of old with a fight in the lobby of the film’s seafront cinema – a way, perhaps, for Mendes (who also wrote the script) to comment on the desecration of cultural institutions and the brutal economic policies of Thatcherism in order to also highlight the precarious state of cinema and the rise of fascism in the current moment.

What the film doesn’t do is tie these things together in a way that allows you to get lost in the story. It’s so schematic you can pretty much predict every plot beat from its opening scenes. Of course it does look great; when you’re Sam Mendes you can also hire Roger Deakens to make the most beautiful visual poetry out the dust particles shimmering in a beam of projector light. Yet for all Mendes’s supposed facility with actors, he’s only really interested in those actors right in his line of vision. Colman and Ward are great together, but any scenes involving the supporting cast are embarrassing to watch, full of cringeworthy dialogue designed to bolster a message about tolerance and kindness. It’s ironic, given the way the film uses a discussion about the dark space between the frames in a reel of film as a metaphor for the way cinema brings life to those on the margins.

Race is also at the heart of Till, a quietly furious biopic of Emmett Till, the Black 14-year-old from Chicago who was lynched in a small Mississippi town in 1955 for whistling at white woman. Directed by Chinonye Chukwu (Clemency), the film is actually only a partial biopic of Emmett (sweetly played by Jalyn Hall); his life was so brutally curtailed that Chukwu focusses most of the movie on exploring how his death helped galvanise the civil rights movement, in part because his mother, Mamie Bradley (Danielle Deadwyler), forced herself to use – and let herself be used by – community leaders, politicians and reporters to get justice for her son and make sure his death wasn’t in vain.

What emerges, then, is really a detailed portrait of a political awakening through pain, one built around Mamie’s realisation that the racism she’s internalised as an independent city dwelling woman who’s fled the South can’t be buried or ignored – something symbolised by the way she insists on the battered, swollen body of her son being displayed for the world to see. Similarly Chukwu doesn’t flinch from showing this aftermath (she doesn’t show his death), but it’s the way she captures this unfolding tragedy on Deadwyler’s face that gives the film its power.

Empire of Light is on general release from 9 January; Till is on general release from 6 January.

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