This week a text from my sister arrived. It was both a question and an expression of dismay.

“Did you know the actor who played Edmund in The Chronicles of Narnia is now a parliamentary assistant to a Conservative MP?!” I hadn’t known and was surprised, so I checked. He is – and the Conservative MP in question backed Brexit at the EU referendum. I sighed before replying: “I guess that’s the British upper class for you.”

This conversation happened on WhatsApp between two French siblings who, until one of us moved across the Channel, had only known about Britain through the British films we loved to watch together. From Narnia to Bridget Jones and Harry Potter to Love Actually, British pop culture has held huge appeal for many French millennials. Most of these films have Christmassy angles that make them perfect to revisit when you’re home for the festive season. This year, though, I’m going to pass. To be honest I need to take time out from a certain kind of Britishness, however beguiled I might once have been.

The French love films that serve up all the cliches we like to think are true about Brits. Top hats, black cabs, ugly Christmas jumpers and the more Hugh Grant the better – anything that represents our neighbours across the Channel as an exquisitely mannered group with eccentric habits. Part of what made Harry Potter so magical to foreign kids was the strange system of private boarding schools and prefects, which seemed to us as improbable as quidditch.

Narnia was exotic even before the heroes entered the world behind the wardrobe, because they lived in a social world that was just strange enough to be completely fascinating. Romcoms such as Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually offered idealised visions of London, as well as dreamy male characters.

There are dozens of upper-class success stories in film and TV, from Downton Abbey to The Crown, and the cause or effect is that the French also love real-life British gentlemen: many still think Boris Johnson is “that funny mayor of London”; they are fascinated with Oxbridge and obsessively follow the royal family’s every move (though they will never admit this unless one of them is getting married, in which case it is fashionable to be interested in royal exemplars). For many of us, this stylised portrait of Brits remains comfortable and familiar: an eccentric lot, but charming and almost always descended from aristocracy or the London upper class.

Having lived in the UK over the past few years though, I’m afraid I’ve lost my innocence. Brexit has ruined the appeal Richard Curtis’s films once held for me. Amid the chaos of the referendum and subsequent Brexit negotiations, and as swaths of society still suffer the consequences of a decade of austerity, I now see this kind of film through a different lens: what strikes me now is the disproportionate dominance of the British upper class in every aspect of the culture.

A top hat used to evoke Dorian Gray or Phileas Fogg; now I can only see Jacob Rees-Mogg. The politeness of the perfect fictional Englishman only reminds me of the hypocrisy that has lurked beneath real politicians’ lovely accents. And as for Old Etonians, they seem to be everywhere, from the cinema screen to the cabinet. And the child actor who played Edmund Pevensie now works for a Brexiteer.

Perhaps it was inevitable that after living among Brits, I have picked up their habit of seeing class everywhere. But thankfully, there are other options available if I want to keep up the tradition of channelling British culture while sitting on the couch this Christmas. There’s the snarky humour of Peep Show, the fearlessness of Chewing Gum, the candour of This Country, the grace of Detectorists.

And there’s Ken Loach. Very few British films about the working classes reach international audiences. Loach is the exception, particularly since The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which received the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival in 2006, and more recently with I, Daniel Blake. He has been hailed by French cinephiles as the British reference point for social cinema, alongside Stephen Frears, still famed for My Beautiful Laundrette.

Yes, as I anxiously follow Brexit news and think of the real Britons I know and love, it’s time to leave behind my love affair with a certain kind of Englishness. With regret and thanks for many happy viewings, this Christmas it’s goodbye to Hugh Grant and hello to Michaela Coel and Mackenzie Crook.

• Pauline Bock is a French journalist based in Brussels