I like the trailer for ‘Empire of Light’. Faced with so many promotions that summarize and gut practically all the content, it is suggestive and does not make it clear what the latest work by Sam Mendes is about.
Of course, later you go to see the film and discover that it’s not that the trailer is deliberately ambiguous but that throughout its two hours of footage the viewer is haunted by the feeling of not knowing exactly what the latest work by Sam Mendes is about. Because ‘The Empire of Light’ mixes different stories and tones without anything harmonizing them, without the mixture reaching its own entity.
On the one hand, it is one, on the other, a tribute to the cinema itself. To the analogue, with the Cinema Empire, facing the British south coast, a beautiful old-fashioned room (it has a closed part, and taken over by pigeons, to accentuate the nostalgia), with its ushers, a projectionist a la ‘Cinema Paradiso ‘ and an explicit vindication of that beam of light that creates the magic of an apparent movement from fixed images, and that can be a refuge and even something healing.
the empire of light
Direction and script:
Sam MendesInterpreters:
Olivia Colman, Micheal Ward, Toby Jones, Colin Firth.Photography:
Roger Deakins.Music:
Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross.Nationality:
UK-US, 2022.Duration:
119 m.
It’s just that that’s just one aspect, because this is first and foremost a film about a disparate couple (a veteran woman feeling “numbed” and a young black man feeling marginalized), and also about racism, and about mental illness. It even tries to be a movie about the times of Margaret Thatcher and a review of the exciting British music of the eighties (The Beat, The Specials, Siouxsie & The Banshees,…).
Unfortunately, in none of its facets does it go very far and the whole, despite its elegance and even sporadic brilliance, remains halfway. Sam Mendes DJs. Luckily, as always, the great actress Olivia Colman and the beautiful work of a master of photography, Roger Deakins, shines there.