★★★★
Veep meets The Zone of Interest in this true-life tale of Vichy France: a shamelessly self-promoting bureaucrat recognises too late that the hollow language of management efficiency that he has been selling can be turned to any purpose that requires it. Clear-eyed and coruscating, Emmanuel Marre has made a great and necessary film.
A Man of his Time (in French: Notre Salut, Our Salvation) is, for a significant portion of its running time, a workplace comedy. Our lead, Henri Marre, shills his self-published book to anyone who will listen. People bicker over where a chair should be placed in an office. An applicant for a secretarial role announces that she puts in as little effort as possible, then happily explains that she likes to put her cards on the table. The director controlled the zoom himself on set, and he uses it with the timing of The Office or The Thick of It, punching in on deadpan expressions at precisely the wrong moment. Around the edges of all this, the annihilating machinery of fascism grinds quietly forward.
Hannah Arendt spoke of the banality of evil, and Marre approaches his subject from the side: the Holocaust stays mostly off screen, reaching us through rumour and statistics, through neatly drawn graphs that Henri anxiously protects from drink stains. We are watching a shameless self-promoter who realises very late, if at all, what exactly he has been promoting. What we have is Veep meets The Zone of Interest.
The film adapts the real letters of director Emmanuel Marre’s own great-grandfather, who arrived in Vichy in 1940 carrying much the same combination of ambition, broke desperation, and self-published political tract. That the director shares his subject’s surname, and has Swann Arlaud carefully spell it out on screen, forms part of the film’s quiet insistence that this story belongs to everyone’s family. What did your grandparents do?
Henri has arrived in Vichy dead broke, having collapsed a business scheme and taken several friends’ money down with him, and left his family stashed in the Nazi-occupied north. He carries his self-published tract, the Notre Salut of the title, a puffed-up patriotic manifesto he deploys as a calling card among his cohort of wilfully fascist and fascist-adjacent compatriots. He is a professional bullshitter, and everyone around him can more or less see through him, while operating as considerably slicker opportunists themselves. When someone jocularly refers to his book as votre salut, your salvation rather than ours, a pointed little accusation, he has no answer.
At one convivial gathering, someone tells Henri that in this time of change one must screw or be screwed, Henri takes it on board. He must, in the nicest possible way, be the screwer. Eventually he finds the key that will unlock opportunity for him: he will present himself as a technocrat, a supplier of efficiencies. This is very different from anything promised by the quasi-romantic title of his book, but then again we never really get to see its contents. What we get instead is the language of streamlined processes and measurable outcomes, a rubric that runs from Henry Ford through to our own management culture. Language stripped of its social and moral meaning, and available to any power that wants it can use it. Rejected from the Vichy cabinet due to a criminal record, the persistent Henri eventually secures a position with the CLC, the Commissariat à la Lutte Contre le Chômage, the unemployment bureau, an institution that presents itself as a force for social modernisation, complete with statistics, graphs and the rhetoric of rational governance. A perfect fit – or so it seems.
The CLC, ostensibly a labour bureau, becomes, by increments the film tracks with horrible patience, an instrument of deportation. Evidence accumulates that some part of Henri knows what he is part of. He picks his jovial no-fuss, low-skilled, card-on-the-table secretary above better qualified options precisely because she seems to be the only person in the building with any remaining humanity. But when that secretary, uncomfortable with the word roundup to describe the removal of Jewish people from Toulouse, suggests “regroupement” instead, Henri validates the euphemism with only the smallest flicker of hesitation. The film is particularly acute on the violence of administrative language.
For the secondary roles Marre cast not professional actors but people whose working lives approximate those of the characters: real senior civil servants, real small business owners. Matte draws verisimilitude from the texture of habit and reflex they provide. These are not the little grey men of historical myth-making, figures of convenient otherness. They are recognisable. Some of them are funny. And yet what they are doing is terrifying.
When people are finally forced to confront what is happening, some finally stand up to be counted, and some hide away. Henri, always triangulating, gives a wonkish, limited compliance – enough to cover himself either way. Meanwhile, a junior official arranges straw and chamber pots for deportees without authorisation, and when his superiors threaten him with dismissal, he offers his resignation instead. This is the closest we come to a hero. Henri’s characterisation asks us: what if Oskar Schindler was both spineless and unimaginative?
Marre shot the whole film on a digital Bolex mimicking 16mm grain, with mostly natural light and an anachronistic 1980s electro soundtrack, joining Marty Supreme in a recent tendency to use anachronistic songs to make the past feel inhabited, and present. The hard light sources in the party scenes give them the Polaroid look of a Vice magazine photo shoot. These people have the energy of hipsters, up and comers, even club kids, jostling to be ‘of the moment’ as Love is Life by Opus blasts from the speakers. (When we all give the power / We all give the best / Every minute of an hour / Don’t think about the rest, they sing, ominously.)
Christian Petzold’s Transit similarly collapsed the temporal distance of the Second World War, though where Petzold placed wartime characters in a contemporary setting, Marre lightly places contemporary aesthetics onto wartime characters. In both cases, the past feels like now, because we never left. Or, in the words of Opus, Every minute of the future / Is a memory of the past.
Eventually Henri has managed to secure the accoutrements of success such that he feels able to bring his family down from the Nazi occupied north of France. When there is time, people attempt to live normally. He buys her a dress for a party. She refuses to wear it because it matches the person he wants her to be in front of his superiors, but not her true self. At the party, everyone dances to Popcorn by Gershon Kingsley. Later, Henri and Paulette go to the cinema to watch a Jean Gabin film. But as we know, the Vichy regime was not long lived, and the walls are closing in. The resistance is looking for him. The world in which he sought to anchor himself is slipping away.
A Man Of His Time is a great and necessary film. Swann Arlaud has never been better, and is surely a front runner for the Cannes Best Actor prize. He plays Henri as a man actively trying to hollow himself out, to get ahead by showing nothing but a mask – but his humanity is never quite snuffed out, and so his misery persists. He is desperate for approval, to be a success. His great dream is to see himself reflected in the gleaming, grateful eyes of his bosses, his wife, Marshall Pétain. In his mind the crushing, haunting, crux of the issue is – will he ever truly be admired? Arlaud is capable in the same moment of appearing almost elegant and utterly abject.
The closest comparison is Trintignant in Bertolucci’s The Conformist, though where Trintignant played a man of the haute bourgeoisie who craves normality and finds it in fascism, Arlaud plays a normal man who craves exceptionalism and finds nothing but paperwork and emptiness. He had visions of being one of the era’s Great Men, leading others to salvation. But everything he holds dear vanishes into the annihilating vortex of history, and thoughts on the Holocaust amount to: we weren’t directly responsible.
That early advice that one must screw or be screwed mirrors the aphorism attributed to Goethe, somewhat beloved by the Nazis: one must be hammer or anvil. Orwell later subverted that formulation: in real life, he observed, it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way around. But the end of A Man of His Time, history has shattered everything.
As the jostling camera and electro party tunes remind us, this dynamic is always threatening to happen somewhere, to someone. Maybe it’s happening now.
A Man of His Time (aka Notre Salut) played in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.