A Man of His Time

From Viennale

At a time when fascism is once again taking hold, Emmanuel Marre courageously turns to his family’s history of collaboration with the Vichy regime to explore the banality of evil. Taking the epistolary relationship between his great-grandparents as a starting point, he freely creates a fictional character, Henri Marre (Swann Arlaud), who sees the national defeat as an opportunity to redeem himself, which only ends up hastening the collapse of his marriage and of democracy. Like any period film, NOTRE SALUT resurrects the past to illuminate the present. Yet Marre’s singularity lies in doing something else on top: instead of just reconstructing history, he also projects contemporary tropes onto the past. The restless camerawork evokes both newsreel footage from the 1940s and the awkward immediacy of The Office, as though the actors, all speaking like today’s polished neoliberal elites, are improvising their way through history. Blatant anachronisms and hard, single-source lighting deepen the unsettling effect. Marre thus narrates French history’s darkest corners from a position of uncertainty, refusing the clarity of hindsight at precisely the moment where choices have to be made. (Antoine Thirion)