As the clock ticks down to 29 March 2019, when Britain will most likely crash out of the European Union, the thoughts of a film critic turn to the movies of next year and the solace they can be expected to bring to Britain’s thousands of new Daniel Blake replicants scrounging around for cans of beans. Next year’s film calendar is of course already set, unlike the terms of our egress from the trade bloc we’ve belonged to since 1973, and since 29 March just so happens to be a Friday we will be treated on that day to a slew of new films as well as worldwide shame.
But do the films of 29 March carry sweet portents for the future of Britain or offer any amusing analogies with our parlous situation? Well, I’m pleased to announce that the two major film releases of the day are a remake of Dumbo and something called Lords of Chaos. Try not to laugh. Other amusingly titled films scheduled to be released in tandem with Britain’s disappearance from the world stage include Nervous Translation and Steel Country. Britain can certainly no longer call itself the latter, since British Steel cut 400 jobs in September of this year and Tata Steel scrapped 2,970 British jobs in 2015-16. In fact, the steel industry across Europe has taken a hit overall following the imposition of American tariffs, but the EU is likely to impose quotas to safeguard its industry, which will of course no longer apply to Britain.
As for Dumbo: anybody seeking parallels between Britain and the story of a determined little circus creature who takes a leap of faith and proves to his bullies and detractors that he really can fly is advised to look elsewhere. No, the Brexit version of Dumbo would centre instead on a cockroach turning somersaults in the sawdust while the crowd marvels at an acrobat doing the splits on top of a lion.
Lords of Chaos, meanwhile, is simply about the bitter internecine warfare between members of a band called Mayhem. The parallels with the Tory party end there, sadly, but it’s fun to map the death-metal names of the group’s constituent musicians on to our politicians du jour. Theresa May would be Mayhem’s founder and lead guitarist Euronymous, of course, while David Davis would be Dead, the vocalist known for “cutting himself and bleeding on the audience, and throwing pig heads at the posers”. (Michael Gove is Faust and Boris Johnson Necrobutcher, for obvious reasons.)
As to whether any of these films stand to make a penny at the box office, historical precedents are a mixed bag. Released at a time of great trauma in Europe, at the height of the London blitz in April 1940, Gone With The Wind famously became one of the second world war’s runaway success stories, running for four years in the West End. In December that year Winston Churchill was up until 2am watching it on a day of overseeing military deployment in north Africa, while Scarlett O’Hara became (somewhat fantastically) a symbol of resistance to totalitarianism. But it somehow feels more probable that most of the films released on 29 March will meet the fate of the Mariah Carey-starring Glitter, which famously opened in New York 10 days after 9/11. Carey blamed the film’s commercial failure on the release of its soundtrack on 11 September, saying: “Here’s the thing that a lot of people don’t know, that movie was released on 11 September 2001 – could there be a worse day for that movie to come out?”
Beyond the success of these movies, serious questions remain about the viability of Britain’s film industry following its exit from the EU. Industry insiders talk of Brexit’s likely fairly negligible impact on British co-productions with Europe (even though such 2018 success stories like Claire Denis’s High Life and Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War are British-European co-productions). Rather, the impact is likely to be felt in British sales and distribution, and could be felt sorely by British film producers if Britain leaves Creative Europe – the EU’s cultural programme of financial support for audiovisual initiatives – in 2020. Should Britain crash out without a deal, the government will be forced to underwrite Creative Europe’s bursaries.
Alongside this, curtailed freedom of movement would certainly harm UK film technicians seeking to work on European productions, and UK productions could struggle to employ cutting-edge special effects and animation creatives from the EU.
The cultural impact of Brexit has never been at the top of our government’s priorities – taking a backseat to, for instance, using dog whistles to stigmatise immigrants – but it will need to be addressed at some point. In the meantime Britain advances into the unknown, like a baby elephant preparing to dive into a bucket from a great height.
• Caspar Salmon is a film writer based in London
