A Man of His Time: Emmanuel Marre’s daring World War II drama explores the dark side of bureaucratic ambition
Swann Arlaud plays a weak-willed Vichy bureaucrat whose craving for status and relevance draws him steadily into collaboration and moral compromise.
- Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival
If Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) is about the banality of evil, A Man of His Time is about the evil of banality. Emmanuel Marre’s second feature film is a France-set World War II drama which takes an unusual path, neither showering veneration on those fighting the good fight in the Resistance, nor peering into the heart of Nazi darkness. Instead, it is a fictionalised biopic of a man forgotten by time – the director’s great-grandfather Henri Marre, whose past was known in brief, but never excavated like this, before the discovery of letters between him and his wife Paulette – a man whose desire for renown, appreciation, even self-esteem, leads him to a middle-management role in Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy regime, and so into various levels of ‘collaboration’ (read: capitulation) to the more powerful Nazis.
A Man of His Time moves through 1940 to 1944 without the historical drama’s usual date-and-place markers. Just as Henri (Swann Arlaud) is thrust through those tumultuous years in world history, buffeted by decisions so far beyond his reach that he barely even knows they’re happening, so too does the viewer often find themselves scrabbling for a contextual anchor point. For the most part, we just know that the situation is getting more and more desperate: for the (often well-meaning) bureaucrats in Vichy trying to dampen Nazi influence on French citizens; for the citizens themselves; and, most poignantly, the foreign and Jewish ‘guest workers’ who are chillingly referenced as another form of capital to be traded between nations.
If Henri was to wish-fulfil himself into the life of a contemporaneous Great Man of History, it may be Robert Oppenheimer, another reedy, steely-eyed man in a wide-brimmed hat – if there’s one thing he craves, it’s consequentiality, for better or worse. But despite his repeated flogging of his unasked for manifesto (whose title, ‘Notre Salut’, is shared by this film in the original French), with its supposedly great ideas for a nation rebuilt after its humiliating capture, he is more akin to David Brent, or one of The Thick of It’s more pathetic hangers-on, ingratiating himself with his employees, bowing and scraping to his superiors and avoiding any sense of moral integrity in favour of making the best move for his career.
Arlaud, internationally best-known (reductively) as Anatomy of a Fall’s ‘hot lawyer’, excels as this man of in-action; it’s a complicated, subtle role to pull off, one whose most-felt emotion is perhaps disappointment, masked by a vacant attempt at the stoicism befitting a man of power. His Keaton-esque deadpan helps balance the film’s unexpected, off-kilter comedic moments too, including two examples of Henri ‘doing the right thing’ for the wrong reasons: sneaking behind a closed Nazi checkpoint to collect an important package for a superior, which turns out to just be a pet cat and hiring the least qualified secretary (incompetence-as-sabotage was a tactic often used to delay German machinations) because he’s amused by her lack of filter.
Director Marre too walks a fine tightrope with occasionally bravura filmmaking that is rarely showy. Shot on a ‘digital Bolex’, sometimes with a flash set above the camera, the image has the confrontational glare of paparazzi footage; it’s a fascinating effect, which feels daringly modern, whilst also bringing the excellent period costumes and sets into stark relief. Equally well-utilised are zooms (the film’s frame seems to be constantly either enlarging or shrinking its viewpoint) which constantly reinforce Henri’s self-imposed isolation – he has a family, including three teenage children, who he puts off bringing to Limoges, where he works.
Anachronistic needle-drops, for decades now a mainstay of arthouse period cinema, are also used interestingly here; a live version of ‘Live Is Life’ by Austrian pop-rock band Opus poignantly complements a newsreel sequence (the film’s only use of documentary footage), while Gershon Kingsley’s instrumental ‘Pop Corn’, played as bureaucrats perform an absurd dance, creates an atmosphere so rancid that we could be watching the libertines of Pasolini’s Salò (1975). What’s most impressive, however, is Marre’s restraint. He trusts in the power of his script, punctuated by the poetic letters between his great-grandparents (it’s never made explicit whether these are quoted verbatim or re-invented), to create a portrait of a quagmired country. He allows his audience to find their own way out of the swamp – one whose modern-day parallels are all too clear.