A MAN OF HIS TIME ©Kidam & Michigan films
Notre Salut (A Man of His Time): Interview with Emmanuel Marre
This is Emmanuel Marre’s first film in Competition. For his second feature film after Rien à foutre (Zero Fucks Given) in 2021,, he delves into his own family archives to share a film about Vichy government officials, these ordinary men who kept the collaboration machine oiled and running. Interview with a filmmaker who, with Notre Salut (A Man of His Time), preferred to focus on the documentary aspect and grotesque administrative machinery of the times rather than create a historical fresco.
The movie is rooted in family history…
Yes. My great-grandfather was a Vichy civil servant. After the defeat, he wrote political theoretical manifestos and his first work was called Notre Salut (Our Salvation), self-published by Fernand Sorlot, the publisher who had released Mein Kampf (My Struggle). This book was part of the family, it wasn’t really a taboo, rather it wasn’t talked about. My great-grandfather was considered a failed government official, a misguided idealist.
Was it the discovery of the letters that started it all?
One of my aunts had kept my great-grandparents’ war correspondence, which this movie is based on. The voiceovers you hear are lifted almost verbatim from these letters. They enabled me to access something very rare, to go through the war on the side of the individuals labeled collaborators, but from within, in their most intimate daily life.
The character doesn’t share his real name.
His last name is only mentioned once, after that he becomes Henri. Because the idea was to give a face to the countless government officials that were cogs in the administration’s machine. It wasn’t about exploring my family history, but rather accessing a memory portal. What did it mean to be ordinary men who allowed the regime to function as it did?
How do you film that without justifying or condemning it?
By being very specific. Henri was in charge of the fight against unemployment. His work consisted of micro-decisions, rationalizing unemployment management, classifying foreign workers, directing Jews toward specific groups. It’s these details that are revealing, not a system that is terrible from the outset, but the entire staircase, where every step seems trivial and we refuse to contemplate what it’s leading to. We also shot in locations where actual events took place, in a hotel in Vichy for example, where the Minister of Finance stayed.
The portrait is also partly psychological.
Henri lands after suffering personal financial failure. He’s simultaneously looking to get back on his feet and help save the country. This was interesting to me. How do fascist regimes create such a climate in which individual neuroses settle and work for them?
You say that the film highlights the grotesque nature of certain situations.
The archives are truly astounding. At the Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs, I opened a file from the National Archives, 30 pages of staff complaints about food and fuel compensation. In the family correspondence, my great-grandfather spent an entire morning checking whether the employees were shouting “Long live the Marshal” at an appropriate volume when the motorcade passed. I trod carefully with what I found. The pendulum easily swings from grotesque to dark until we realize it’s no longer funny. The idea is to enable the viewer to have a certain empathy for the character, but not to confuse that emotion with sympathy. This is the most confronting aspect, contemplating this from a contemporary point of view.
How did you direct Swann Arlaud and Sandrine Blancke?
Both of them were able to let go, to not fully know their character. We created a framework for improvisation. Swann was already in character, someone trying to fill boots that are too large for him, and physically he incorporated this idea too. He also had the ability to veer off into ridicule in a way that was completely stripped of ego. Sandrine’s role was more difficult. Her character goes on the opposite journey. What Henri refuses to see, she becomes aware of. She was able to live this in the moment, without using her character to convey today’s ideas.
