‘A Man of His Time’ Review: Swann Arlaud Plays a Fly on the Wall to Creeping Fascism

Cannes: Emmanuel Marre fictionalizes the experiences of his great-grandfather in this bold political drama, who was a functionary in France’s collaborationist government during World War II. 

Swann Arlaud has become one of the most acclaimed French actors of his generation, as well as one of the more unlikely heroes of Gen Z film meme culture. It was the social media footprint of “Anatomy of a Fall” in the 2023 awards season, where this reviewer became familiar with the term “fancam” — in that movie’s case, meaning a quick-fire supercut of lusty close-ups of Arlaud in his role as a cool-tempered lawyer. And watching the journey of “Magellan” from last year’s Cannes, we saw on our feeds a similar mix of unlikely subject in Gael Garcia Bernal’s colonialist and the resourceful work of the “clippers”. 

In Emmanuel Marre’s “A Man of his Time”, one of the more high-pedigreed Gallic titles in this year’s Cannes competition, Arlaud’s fine-boned features are cannily weaponized: he’s allowed no virtue and even less redemption in his role as the Vichy state official Henri Marre, a figure the director bases audaciously on his own great-grandfather. Employed in the “rump state” remainder of France, following its 1940 defeat by Germany in the war’s early years, his position in the Department of Labor makes him an unexceptional witness to history, and also an indirect participant in the Nazis’ persecution of European Jews. 

Still, despite the provocation in its approach — extending to its use of “Marty Supreme”-like counterpointing 80’s needle-drops, and DoP Olivier Boonjing’s verité camerawork — “A Man of his Time” is ultimately one of the more disappointing competition entries this year amongst the little-loved line-up. Its 155-minute runtime suggests a grand historical epic, yet it’s more of a historical patchwork, featuring Marre in nearly every scene in his middle-management post, where he and the audience absorb breadcrumbs of exposition on France’s humiliation and eventual Resistance-aided liberation. Marre’s position as the most anti- of anti-heroes initially feels like it’s going to generate fresh insight (not to mention contemporary prescience) on the era, yet the film can only restate the basics on one of the most mythologized periods in French history. 

Otherwise, its early passages give hope for a deeper-digging character study of Marre. His exact political position at the inception of Vichy is quite singular, if still firmly on the right: the film’s French-language title “Notre Salut” derives from a pamphlet he produces, and through which he tries to claim some notoriety as an ambitious, ideologically driven commentator on France’s travails. Yet when we hear excerpts from it at a fancy soirée, not long after the establishment of post-1940 government headed by Marshall Pétain, it sounds garbled and incoherent, a combination of admonitions to national unity and efficiency, and oddly more ahead-of-their-time musings on “the flow of information”. A sporadically successful consultant on engineering prior to the war, his handing out of copies, in a later scene, is more like a hapless screenwriter or film producer thrusting printed drafts or business cards into his marks’ hands. 

Also trenchant is the diagnosis of Henri as one of the more superficial strains of “career politicians”. With all the likely-good Frenchmen having exiled themselves, or joined the Resistance, his hopes to be a cabinet minister (he’s shunted eventually to the Labor department’s Unemployment division) seem bound up to providing him belated social advancement, and to placate his semi-estranged wife Paulette (Sandrine Blancke), who we initially hear in voice-over readings of her quite withering letter correspondence. 

The film pivots on what’s now a familiar question about the psychology of carrying out evil; as senior Nazi officials make more appearances on France’s streets and attempt to twist their arms on procedure, are state bureaucrats, such as Marre, complicit just by “following orders”, or is genuine ideological motivation required? The filmmaker knows his great-grandfather isn’t a card-carrying antisemite or fascist, yet we can see how the levers of this government have frozen the hands supposedly turning them — after a certain point, the machinery just controls you, and you not it. 

Marre gives his namesake a chance to say a decisive “no” when, late in the film, the Nazi representatives demand energy resources for their transportation of imprisoned Jews. Yet Arlaud’s frozen acquiescence is the very fuel permitting atrocities from those with political power, then and now.

The late Frederick Wiseman has been a particular influence on French auteur filmmaking, as his overall canonical reputation has grown (indeed, he lived many of his last years in Paris). After Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden” provided its lengthy anatomy of a struggling elder-care home, Marre also appears to have learnt how committee meetings are the new car-chases, as cinematic suspense goes, and that audiences have a wider bandwidth than you’d think to simply sit and listen in real-time, as arguments are made and worked through, although this time by tinpot Vichy bureaucrats, and not public-sector heroes. Armando Iannucci’s pre-“Veep” smash “The Thick of It” is also evoked in its squirming — and awkward silence-scored — examination of political failure. It’s not to overly condemn Marre as a director, yet his portrayal of past fascism doesn’t always provide insight onto today’s, in France and elsewhere; too much of “A Man of his Time” feels like reassurance for guilty French liberals, that they are (and we are) too enlightened for these events to ever occur again. 

Grade: B

“A Man of His Time” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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