Emmanuel Marre found his great-grandfather's letters in a family drawer — the kind of drawer that exists, as he puts it, everywhere in France. What he built from them is not a Holocaust film in the conventional sense. Notre Salut (released internationally as A Man of His Time) is a study of administrative complicity: how a mid-level functionary processes paperwork that routes human beings to death camps, and how he never once stops to ask what his room for manoeuvre might be. The most devastating scene involves bureaucratic haggling over the cost of straw and chamber pots for Jews on cattle trucks. The film's formal choices are deliberately disorienting. Modern lighting, improvised dialogue, and an anachronistic 1980s Europop soundtrack refuse to let the audience retreat into period-piece comfort. This is not a costume drama you can watch at a safe historical distance. Marre won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes for the script, and the film opened strongly in French cinemas this week, drawing notably young audiences. Notre Salut arrives during a boom in French WWII cinema — the two-part de Gaulle biopic sold over 5 million tickets, Les Rayons et les Ombres tackled collaborationist press baron Jean Luchaire, and a forthcoming film covers resistance leader Jean Moulin's final days. But where those films orbit great figures, Marre's film insists on the ordinary. Historian Marc Olivier Baruch, a specialist on Vichy administrators, calls this the film's power: history is made by 'second-players, the grassroots who act on the ground.' The political context is impossible to ignore. Marine Le Pen's National Rally leads polls for next spring's presidential election. Mediapart has published an investigation alleging party leader Jordan Bardella made antisemitic comments as a young member, which he denies. Historian Henry Rousso, writing in Le Monde, frames the connection carefully: 'The RN is not the fascism of the 1930s, nor a resurgence of the Pétain regime, but knowing this history allows an understanding of what it is the heir to, and how the mechanisms of gradually renouncing democratic and republican values led to disaster.' Baruch identifies the deeper pull for modern audiences: France is living through 'a time of great uncertainty' marked by a 'strong lack of confidence among French people in their elites and in their state.' He notes that the Vichy regime remains the only period since 1820 when the far right held power in France — four years at the heart of the twentieth century. The impulse to stop talking about Vichy, to draw a line under it, is, he says plainly, 'stupid, and not possible.' Marre himself resists the flagellation narrative. The film, he says, is about prying open those family drawers not as punishment but as understanding. 'Between resistance and collaboration, there is a whole range of human emotions, even the most ambiguous.' The film's real subject is the vast grey middle — the space where most people actually live under authoritarian conditions, making small accommodations that compound into catastrophe. Notre Salut does not argue that France in 2026 is France in 1942. It argues something more uncomfortable: that the bureaucratic reflexes, the impulse to process rather than question, the preference for order over conscience — these are not historical artifacts. They are permanent features of institutional life, and the only defense against them is the willingness to look.
