‘A Man Of His Time’ Cannes Review: Emmanuel Marre’s Chilling And Eerily Contemporary Study Of Everyday Complicity

The third film I’ve seen at Cannes about the Nazi occupation of France — the other two being Moulin and When the Night Falls — is the best and most complex of the three, distinguished not only by the angle it takes in telling its story but by its genuinely original narrative approach. Based on letters exchanged between the director’s grandparents, Emmanuel Marre expands those documents into a semi-fictionalized account of what their lives might have looked like — centering primarily on his grandfather Henri. What sets the film apart is, first, that its protagonist is a collaborator with the Vichy regime, and second, the quietly compassionate — or at least non-condemning — portrait Marre draws of him.

But the film’s most distinctive quality is its tone: bureaucratic, routine, thick with meetings, petty disputes, and institutional maneuvering, all captured by a camera that operates almost like a surveillance device, withholding dramatic charge from what it observes. Anything approaching emotion — or, more precisely, any reflection on what we’re witnessing — comes filtered through the voice-over of Henri’s wife, read from the letters she sends him, and occasionally his own replies. It is there, and only there, that the drama surfaces — as commentary on an existence that stages, once more, the banality of evil.

The comparison may be excessive, but something in A Man of His Time calls The Zone of Interest to mind. Without the formal radicalism of Jonathan Glazer’s film, Marre’s picture similarly adopts a near-spectral mode of observation, watching events that begin as ethically murky and end as something far worse. The film traces Henri Marre (Swann Arlaud) through the lower corridors of Vichy power — a collaborationist apparatus propped up by the Nazi occupation during the Second World War.

When we meet Henri, he is maneuvering desperately to attach himself to figures of influence within this puppet government, pitching his credentials — he’s an engineer — to one bureaucrat after another, with little success. He also takes to handing out and promoting a book he has written, titled Notre salut (as is the film’s French-language title), in which he lays out his philosophy and his prescriptions for France’s recovery.

Eventually he secures a position in the Department of Unemployment and begins accumulating modest power under the regime of Marshal Pétain. Once settled in Limoges, his wife Paulette (Sandrine Blancke) and their children join him. The affection between them is thin, more visible in their letters than in the dry, routine domesticity they inhabit together. As time passes and the Nazis’ crimes become harder to ignore — rumors circulate that Jews are being deported to some unknown destination — Henri and his family must decide how, if at all, to respond.

Marre, who co-directed the excellent Zero Fucks Given, introduces an arresting formal wrinkle: at intervals, he scores scenes with contemporary or danceable music from the 1980s onward — Alphaville, and at one point the ubiquitous Opus track Live Is Life — including, in one scene, a full-on choreographed sequence. These moments feel dislocated from the film’s prevailing register, but they work nonetheless, perhaps because they puncture the repetitive flatness that the film, by design, otherwise sustains. That flatness is intentional — but it remains flatness.

And that is one of the inherent challenges of dramatizing the pedestrian, bureaucratic logic through which ordinary people holding positions of minor authority become complicit in atrocity. Nothing Henri does appears, in the moment, obviously criminal. But working for collaborationists, participating in the machinery that makes certain decisions and turns a blind eye to others, accumulates an ethical weight that grows heavier as the film goes on.

A Man of His Time is an original work — creative, formally unusual, unlike almost any other biographical film set during World War II. That distinctiveness makes it genuinely hard to categorize. It is not the dutiful adaptation of a celebrated novel or a Great Man narrative; it is the story of a mediocre man, someone willing to do whatever it takes to maintain his foothold, to avoid making trouble, to fulfill his obligations and stop being the sort of failure who steals food from parties to survive and swallows humiliation after humiliation.

In some sense, the flatness of Marre’s approach opens the film onto the present. Not only formally — the staging and the contemporary sounding dialogue makes the distance between observer and event unmistakably legible — but politically. With the rise of new right-wing movements across the Western world, the millions of Henris who populate our own moment are almost certainly looking the other way, persuaded they have nothing to do with what’s happening around them. As long as they have a safe position, a roof, and a job, what happens to others is not their problem. Until, as the famous poem goes, it is far too late.