Mort la révolution! Why UK film loves a failed rebellion

Paul Greengrass’s Peasants’ Revolt epic, The Uprising, is just the latest in a long line of movies depicting an unsuccessful attempt at remaking the nationThe British are perverse. We fetishise our failures, even if they are essentially tangential to a national narrative that should be about imperial conquest, slavery and being unremittingly unpleasant to foreigners. We tell and retell, for instance, the story of Captain Scott even though he died in Antarctica in 1912 after losing the race to reach the south pole first to the unacceptably Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Similarly, Christopher Nolan’s 2017 film Dunkirk typified the British tendency to snatch national glory from the jaws of defeat. And then there was the tragicomic disaster of the Charge of the Light Brigade during the 1853-56 Crimean war in which our boys raced to putatively glorious if stupid deaths. It’s as if, for us British, pointless sacrifice and embracing failure are what heroism means. And our cinema has colluded with this perversity.But there is an exception to this national veneration of failure. Britain has been reluctant to embrace its revolutionary defeats. There is, for instance, no film dealing with the Ch…

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