Transnational Encounters in Peri-Brexit Cinema

Abstract

Filmic representations of the transnational coupling US woman/English man, rife in Anglo-American cinema, tend to rely on commodified iterations of British and US-American identities, which are recognisable by audiences and adaptable to the transnational cultural market. This article explores representations of these “special relationships” in the attempt to detect identity construction processes and negotiations that were relevant in the context surrounding Brexit, understood not only as a political event but as a larger cultural phenomenon. This transnational coupling, the article argues, allows for a contraposition of identities that results in a rendering of commodified, exportable versions of Englishness that resonate with the discourses of what this article calls peri-Brexit cinema: films that were released around the times of Brexit, chronologically speaking, but also discursively. Following this framework, this article analyses the depoliticised idea of Englishness at stake in Richard Curtis’ About Time (2013) and explores how Sean Durkin’s The Nest (2020) offers examples of identity work that are in tune with the disenchanted post-referendum affective landscape.