Allegories of pandemic governance: Comedy, cramped space, and national imaginaries in European cinema
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Date
2026-09-04
Authors
Brett, Oliver
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Film and Screen Media, University College Cork
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Abstract
This article examines three comedy fiction films produced during the COVID-19 pandemic in different European contexts: Lockdown all’italiana (Enrico Vanzina, Italy, 2020), Stuck Together (8 Rue de l’Humanité, Dany Boon, France, 2021) and Locked Down (Doug Liman, UK, 2021). While the use of comedy was widely criticised as inappropriate to the representation of an unfolding public health crisis, this article argues that such responses overlook the films’ engagement with the political and affective conditions through which the pandemic was experienced. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatttari’s “cramped space”, the article explores how these texts function as allegories of pandemic governance, refracting national imaginaries of community responsibility and collective life. The formal hybridity of these films—combining comedy, fiction, and a documentary impulse—reflects the material constraints of pandemic filmmaking and the broader representational challenges of narrativising lived experience under conditions of uncertainty. Rather than offering reassurance or resolution, the films perform provisional gestures of adjustment within an impasse, revealing culturally specific attachments to sociopolitical traditions: regionalised governance in Italy, republican imaginaries of collective citizenship in France, and liberal-individualist models of responsibility in the UK. The article demonstrates the political potential of comedy and fiction as modes through which crisis, governance, and national identity may be negotiated.
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Brett, O. (2026) 'Allegories of pandemic governance: Comedy, cramped space, and national imaginaries in European cinema', Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 31, pp. 33–68. https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.31.03