A MAN OF HIS TIME (NOTRE SALUT) World Cinema

Writer-director Emmanuel Marre takes an unconventional approach to this biopic on an unconventional subject. Winner of the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival, A MAN OF HIS TIME follows Henri Marre (Swann Arlaud), a careerist climbing the ranks of the Vichy regime in 1940s France. Henri imagines himself a prophet of managerial principles, evangelizing for the rationalization of bureaucratic workflow as laid out in his self-published treatise, “Our Salvation.” But his ambitions belie his lack of conviction, shifting with the political winds of the Occupation, hovering on the periphery of decisionmakers, eavesdropping into opportunity. Rather than the monumental stagings characteristic of a historical epic, Marre’s approach miniaturizes events, situating the audience as something of a fly on the wall in the clerks’ offices and committee meetings that oil the machinery of Nazi occupation. At the same time, he flamboyantly betrays this naturalism with conspicuous aesthetic flourishes, such as anachronistic music and blaring spotlights used to augment the otherwise insistence on practical lighting. Amidst the many hollow men and spiritual malaise of the administrative state, letters from Henri’s wife, Paulette (Sandrine Blancke), read in voiceover, wend through the story, providing a poetic counterbalance that affirms life, desire and romance and decries their loss, both in her marriage with Henri and in the larger society of wartime France. Playing a couple, Blancke and Arlaud are fire and ice, with Arlaud’s crumpled paper-pusher unable to answer the zeal that animates Blancke’s elegant and sophisticated Paulette. One is trying to hold onto something beautiful and true; the other is chasing the chimera of greatness in a future few want to see come to pass. –Travis Weedon