THE STORY – In 1940, Henri Marre arrives in Vichy with aspirations to publish his manuscript Notre Salut, which he hopes will rescue France from the Vichy regime.
THE CAST – Swann Arlaud, Sandrine Blancke & Mathieu Perotto
THE TEAM – Emmanuel Marre (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 153 Minutes
Everyone likes to imagine that, in historic periods of strife and turmoil, they would’ve been on the side of the good guys. Plenty of films have focused on those who marched under the banner of justice and the betterment of mankind throughout history. In fact, I’ve seen two films at this year’s Cannes Film Festival alone about those fighting against the Nazis as members of the French Resistance. But what about those who took the opposing path? The ones who, for one reason or another, chose to side with the oppressor? In France, there were obviously a great number of citizens who, rather than working to smuggle intel or harbor fugitives, as so many works of art have depicted, put their hands up and kept their heads down as they accepted, or even helped, the occupying German forces. “A Man of His Time” tells such a story, following a civil servant who philosophically opposed the Nazis but didn’t fight back, instead serving on a committee under the Vichy government. And astoundingly, the central figure of the film is director Emmanuel Marre’s real-life great-grandfather, Henri Marre.
The Marre of the film (played by Swann Arlaud, best known to international audiences for “Anatomy of a Fall”) isn’t thrilled by the regime’s practices that split his country in two. As he mentions at the party that opens the film, “Nazism is vulgar and dangerous.” But at the same time, he believes that this restructuring offers the people of France a chance to “rebuild everything,” and he wants to be a part of it. He’s clearly not one to let a pesky thing like morals get in the way of his upward mobility. He’s not even embarrassed to sling copies of his pro-Marshal Pétain (the French head of the Vichy state) book all over town. His manifesto is called “Notre Salut” (the film’s original French title), which brashly translates to “Our Salvation.” He worms his way into a position in the government’s unemployment branch, where he has a front row seat to the ways that the Nazis would go on to use bureaucratic methods to further their plans, even in France’s supposedly free zone.
Arlaud doesn’t overly emphasize Marre’s slimy opportunism. Instead, he feels like just another pick-me governmental drone with modest aspirations of power. The world has always been filled with men like him, the kind who rarely make the history books but serve as the foundation on which eventually recognizable names can commit their memorable acts, both good and bad. Instead, Arlaud’s Marre doesn’t raise his voice or make excessive gestures; he’s but an amiable yes man. And still, Arlaud manages to give off a magnetic energy, making it understandable how he could advance in the way he does despite not being excessively ambitious, at least on the outside. He’s even minutely charming enough that people aren’t obviously put off by the shameless plugging of his own writing.
With the opening scene, director Marre films his 1940s partygoers with an unsteady handheld camera, lighting them with a bold spotlight that makes it feel as if they’re being raided. This shooting style continues throughout the film, lending a documentary quality to the fictionalized historical drama. It’s certainly not how movies of the time period would’ve been filmed, but it does call to mind newsreel footage of the era, albeit colorized and with a more contemporary quality. This yanks the film into the present day, stripping any antiquated varnish from the story and forcing viewers to reckon with the fact that history has a way of repeating itself, as the current rise in fascist ideology proves. But this isn’t the only way that Marre aligns the past and the present. At times, he deploys anachronistic music choices, not just as background, but even in one scene, having the characters do an odd dance to the Moog synth song “Popcorn” by the 1970s group Hot Butter. These moments are obviously startling, but bring a welcome jolt to the otherwise tepid film.
Despite being made up of undeniably interesting parts, from its story to its cinematography, it’s hard to deny that “A Man of His Time” runs far too long. The pace could be charitably called “deliberate,” or uncharitably, “sluggish.” The greatest contributors to this issue are the seemingly endless scenes of government officials droning on and on, talking in circles about administrative points in a numbingly plain fashion. The purpose is clear: evil can be most easily perpetuated when it’s seen as banal and unremarkable, but that doesn’t make for a compelling viewing experience when executed in this way. It’s very easy to imagine that the film’s points would’ve remained the same if some of the more exhaustingly bureaucratic scenes were trimmed. And a more engaged audience would likely be even more invested in the story being told if it were more cinematically captivating.
The title “A Man of His Time” sounds like a phrase someone might use to excuse the undesirable actions of their ancestors, chalking up poor decisions in hindsight as near-inevitable relics of a different way of thinking. But with his film, director Emmanuel Marre does the opposite with his great-grandfather, unashamedly depicting his worst choices and, perhaps even more damningly, his disastrous areas of disinterest. It’s a brilliant concept for an historical film, but the way Marre tells his relatives’ unheroic story would’ve been better served by a more discerning eye on the film’s runtime.
