Where some see disaster, others see victory … No, not the fraught events of 1940 as depicted in Christopher Nolan’s war epic, but the right’s battle against Europe. Has cinema become a willing ally?

You can’t blame Christopher Nolan for Brexit. The director was halfway through making Dunkirk, his new war epic, when the EU referendum took place last June. But if the leave campaign had wanted to make a rousing propaganda movie to stir the nation, it couldn’t have picked a better subject matter. Dunkirk has got it all: Britain standing alone against the world, our manufacturing superiority prevailing, the nation coming together – all in a literal effort to get out of Europe. If he had got the film together a little earlier, perhaps Nigel Farage wouldn’t have needed to cite Independence Day in his morning-after victory speech.

The Dunkirk analogy has already been trotted out by leave campaigners, of course. Last February, for example, three months before she (wrongly) claimed that Britain would be powerless to prevent Turkey joining the EU, Tory minister Penny Mordaunt wrote an opinion piece for the Daily Telegraph titled “The spirit of Dunkirk will see us thrive outside the EU”. “In our long island history, there have been many times when Britain has not been well-served by alignment with Europe,” she wrote. “When Britain stood alone in 1940 after the defeat at Dunkirk, we were cut off and ridiculed. True leadership sometimes does feel isolating. Yet we have never suffered for it. We are resourceful; we are well connected; our brand is strong in the world.”

Dunkirk review – Christopher Nolan's apocalyptic war epic is his best film so far Read more

Never mind that Britain didn’t actually stand alone at that precise point during the war. Or that Winston Churchill favoured “indissoluble” union with an as-yet undefeated France. Or that by standing together with our European neighbours over the past 40 years, we have avoided another Dunkirk. This is the Brexiter version of British identity in a nutshell: proudly isolated, independent, not European, and “strong in the world”. And to be clear, this is primarily English identity we are talking about, given that a majority in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain.

When it comes to the great “how did we get here?” reckoning over Brexit, few would discount these notions of English identity and, by extension, the narratives that have shaped them. So it is only fair that we examine what part British cinema might have played in all this.

Our film industry was almost unanimously against Brexit. Some 250 star names from across the arts signed an open letter in this paper urging Britons to vote remain, and the consensus is that homegrown cinema will suffer as a result of leaving the EU. But could it be that certain sectors of the industry have been putting out the opposite message? That is not to say that our movies were directly advocating Brexit, but just as the EU referendum split the nation into “leave” and “remain” camps, so we can view our film industry’s recent output through the same prism.

It’s not just Dunkirk: the second world war as a whole has been co-opted as a myth of English exceptionalism and isolationism. Churchill is the Brexiters’ patron saint. They are always banging on about him, from Farage persuading Donald Trump to put a Churchill bust back in the Oval Office, to Boris Johnson writing a biography of him, before likening the EU to Hitler and claiming that Churchill would have joined him on the Brexit bus. Meanwhile, Michael Gove bemoaned the lack of emphasis on Churchill, eminent Victorians and “Britain and her empire” in the history curriculum. Or “our island story”, as he put it. “This trashing of our past has to stop,” he complained.

It certainly has in the movies. Brian Cox’s Churchill is just ending its cinema run, having raked over the D-Day landings once again. Meanwhile, John Lithgow recently received an Emmy nomination for his Churchill portrayal in The Crown, and Gary Oldman is just removing the prosthetic jowls, having wrapped Darkest Hour, Joe Wright’s forthcoming drama focusing on the early days of the war. Inevitably, that includes Dunkirk, and another rendition of the “we will fight on the beaches” speech (in a nice touch, Nolan’s Dunkirk puts the words into the mouth of an ordinary soldier). All of this should nicely tee up Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Battle of Britain movie.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in the forthcoming Darkest Hour. Photograph: Universal

And let’s not forget Lone Scherfig’s drama Their Finest, which paid tribute to the power of propaganda movies to change hearts and minds during wartime. Working on her own story of Dunkirk heroism, the fledgling screenwriter played by Gemma Arterton has to massage the truth a little to get the message straight. Perhaps that is a fitting analogy.

More than ever, nostalgia has become a major component of British cinema, and very little of it seriously challenges or questions our ossified English self-image. On the one hand, there is country house/royal family nostalgia fare, such as The King’s Speech, The Crown and Downton Abbey. On the other, there are postwar heroes such as James Bond, still peddling that “nobody does it better” fantasy of English exceptionalism, colonial supremacy, and overstated British virility.

Blended in with this nostalgia is a certain amount of class envy. The two go hand in hand: it is only the posher echelons of the past that we are interested in. If there is a case to answer that Brexit was about the disfranchisement of the working class, again, British cinema needs to take a look at itself.

Even Britain’s new identity myths still lean heavily on our posh past. Take away the magic and Harry Potter is essentially a fantasy of an Edwardian public school, in which an ordinary kid is spirited to an opulent, centuries-old educational institution where they write with quills and never use mobile phones, and the dining tables groan with wholesome English grub. Even the class-mobility element is a bit of a con: Harry is only granted access to this elite world because of his breeding. The genuinely “ordinary” folks in Harry Potter are his adoptive family, the Dursleys, who are portrayed as fat, greedy, ignorant and uncultured.

It is the same story with James Bond’s latter-day rival, Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman, the second instalment of which is due in cinemas soon. As with Bond, it is a secret agent myth with a fetish for Savile Row tailoring and E-type Jaguars and all things English and the upper-class. And, like Harry Potter, the twist is that it is an ordinary, council estate-dwelling teenager, named Eggsy, who has bought into this secret club. But the twist to the twist is that Eggsy’s deceased father was also a secret agent. So actually, it is where he belongs – unlike the rest of his council estate residents, who, again, the film treats with utter contempt.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A more hopeful time: 2001’s Bend It Like Beckham offered a different view of Britain. Photograph: Action Press/Rex Features

It used to be that British cinema celebrated the working class – from British new wave classics such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top and A Taste of Honey, right through to the 1990s and early 2000s, when we still made hits of the calibre of The Full Monty, Brassed Off, Billy Elliot and Trainspotting. Despite the commercial success of costume dramas, Richard Curtis romcoms and Bridget Jones, the likes of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh carried the torch.

Looking back, the 90s was a golden age for multiculturalism in British cinema, too. We had British-Asian stories such as East Is East and Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach and Bend It Like Beckham. We had dramas sympathetic to immigrants, such as Dirty Pretty Things (in which the hero was a Nigerian immigrant) and Last Resort (in which a Russian asylum-seeker is treated kindly in Margate). We had Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (tracking two Afghan refugees’ struggle to reach the UK). It seems like a bygone era. Where have those films gone? What changed?

It is interesting that these movies tailed off at about the same time the Cool Britannia moment – a period when Britain felt modern and relevant – went cold. By the crash of 2008, and the coalition government, being cool was a frivolous luxury. The national mood swung to Keep Calm and Carry On mode. Instead of referring back to swinging 60s hedonism, the nostalgia swung back even further, to wartime austerity, union jack bunting and Bake Off.

Whether British cinema informed the Brexit sensibility or simply responded to a national change of sentiment is debatable, but not all attempts to deal with history and identity fall into the “leave” end of the spectrum. We have had movies such as Pride, which told of striking miners and LGBT Londoners coming together in the 1980s. And Paddington, an open-minded children’s comedy that celebrated Britain’s history of multiculturalism, acceptance and generosity towards immigrants, be they Peruvian bears or Jewish children arriving on the Kindertransport. “Paddington, in a sense, was a refugee,” the late Michael Bond told this paper, “and I do think that there’s no sadder sight than refugees.” Britain doesn’t “stand alone” in these movies; it reaches out.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brothers in arms: Djimon Hounsou and Charlie Hunnam in King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword. Photograph: Warner Bros/Rex/Shutterstock

Another recent example, even if it was too critically panned to really register, is Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. The story is another one of those foundation stones of English identity that has been repackaged so many times we are sick of hearing it. (Boris Johnson likened dealing with Paris to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where the French launch a dead cow at King Arthur and fart in his general direction). But Ritchie’s King Arthur did something interesting with it. His Arthur is a street-savvy Londoner whose accomplices, the future Knights of the Round Table, include two African-descent characters (Djimon Hounsou and Kingsley Ben-Adir), one Chinese man (Tom Wu) and a Mediterranean witch (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey). What could have been a Brexit-friendly story about Britons “taking control”, Ritchie instead turned into a remainer’s fantasy: a tale of multicultural metropolitans overthrowing an entrenched aristocracy. This King Arthur even makes peace with his European foes, and ends the film by re-establishing diplomatic relations with the Vikings.

To its credit, Nolan’s Dunkirk avoids flag-waving jingoism in favour of a more complex account of events. The heroism and courage and sacrifice is duly celebrated, but the movie acknowledges there was also panic, chaos, fear and cowardice. There was xenophobia – “English only!” shouts the naval officer, turning French soldiers away from the rescue ships – but there was also solidarity: “I’m staying … for the French,” says Kenneth Branagh’s naval commander, as he watches the last British troops sail home. Nolan has said he approached the film “from the point of view of the pure mechanics of survival rather than from the politics of the event”.

It is a theme that resonates beyond Dunkirk itself, and far beyond the Brexit interpretation of it. As we watch hundreds of thousands of unfortunate people huddled on the beaches, hoping for deliverance, the similarity between our boys trying to get home and present-day migrants striving desperately to reach Europe is impossible to ignore. Our identity myths should surely be able to accommodate both.

Dunkirk is released on 21 July.