Vichy Regime Film Sparks Reflection on France’s Past

Emmanuel Marre’s Notre Salut (Our Salvation), released internationally as A Man of His Time, is doing what few historical dramas manage: pulling young French audiences into a reckoning with the Vichy regime’s collaboration with the Nazis. The 2026 Franco-Belgian film — winner of the Best Screenplay prize at the 79th Cannes Film Festival — opened in French cinemas on 30 September, and its unflinching portrait of an ordinary bureaucrat inside an authoritarian machine has made it one of the season’s most talked-about releases.

Notre Salut’s Modern Take on a Dark Past

Rather than grand battles or famous figures, Marre trains the camera on the mundane machinery of collaboration: a 49-year-old civil servant, Henri Marre (Swann Arlaud), who arrives in Vichy in September 1940 carrying a self-published political manifesto titled — like the film — Notre Salut. Convinced that administrative “efficiency” can rescue France from defeat, he works his way into the new order, and the film follows his slow absorption into a system of complicity.

The film deliberately breaks period-drama conventions. Modern lighting and anachronistic 1980s Europop cues — the soundtrack draws on acts such as Opus and Hot Butter — jolt viewers out of costume-drama comfort. The gesture is widely read as a reminder that the ideological currents running through Vichy France did not politely expire in 1944.

Inspired by Family Letters

Marre drew on roughly 300 letters from his own family archives to shape the film, tracing a fictionalized version of his great-grandfather. Rather than idealizing his family history, he paints a razor-sharp portrait of a man whose convictions bend to whatever serves him best — and of how, in wartime, opportunism curdles into collaboration. The film’s festival run continues: it is slated for its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival, according to Film at Lincoln Center.

Sandrine Blancke co-stars as Paulette Marre, anchoring the emotional distance between private life and political commitment, while the supporting cast includes Mathieu Perotto and Harpo Guit.

Why France Is Watching Now

The release lands in a France doing some hard looking at itself. The 2027 presidential election is on the horizon, and recent Toluna Harris Interactive polling has put Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in the lead at 33–36% in first-round scenarios — a measure of how unsettled the political landscape has become as Emmanuel Macron’s era ends.

There is also a wider cinematic trend. Antonin Baudry’s two-part Charles de Gaulle epic, La Bataille de Gaulle, turned a weak opening into a word-of-mouth phenomenon, passing five million admissions in France — evidence of a real public appetite for confronting the country’s wartime history.

The Bureaucracy of Complicity

Historians have long stressed that the Vichy regime — the collaborationist government under Marshal Philippe Pétain — functioned through the quiet labor of thousands of ordinary administrators. Under Vichy, some 76,000 Jews were deported from France to concentration and extermination camps. Marre’s film keeps its gaze on the desks, files and timetables that made that machinery run — Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” in its unadulterated ordinariness.

That is the film’s provocation: complicity is not only a matter of ideology, but of paperwork, ambition and looking the other way. Personal frustration and the hunger for a place in the system, the film suggests, can be as dangerous as fanaticism.

Conclusion

Notre Salut is not an easy night at the cinema, but it is a necessary one — a reminder that authoritarian systems run on ordinary people doing their jobs. As France heads toward a consequential election, the film asks an uncomfortable, timely question: what do our own small choices add up to?

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