Emmanuel Marre won the Best Screenplay Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for A Man of His Time aka Notre Salut, because it does the impossible: it is a comedy about the slide into fascism. But the film is clearly of personal as well as professional importance to Mr. Marre, because the lead character is based on his great-grandfather. Mr. Marre, who also directed, walked the Cannes red carpet carrying a camera which belonged to that relative, as an act of contempt towards the man, so his relic could experience how the world remembers him. The inspiration for the script was letters between him and his wife which remain in the possession of the family. And it’s clearly through study of those letters that Mr. Marre figured out how why this personal story needed telling. Plenty of people go through their lives focusing only on their small day-today choices. These people can look up with astonishment at the realisation their blinders and their selfishness has enabled them to do evil, possibly without even realising it. And the way A Man of His Time captures the bigger picture is by refusing to look at it at all.
That is not to say that Henri Marre (Swann Arlaud) didn’t mean well. His pamphlet, Notre Salut, (aka Our Salvation) was indeed intended as a guide for France to avoid the Vichy regime. But the trouble is publishing it used up the last of his wife Paulette’s (Sandrine Blancke) inheritance. She is furious with him and threatening a divorce, and scruples don’t feed and clothe three children. So Henri, who originally made his way to Vichy to attempt to get his pamphlet into interested hands, makes his desperation for work so palpable that people turn away. But eventually someone realises that desperation could be put to good use. Well, good is not the operative word here. But instead Henri chooses to close his eyes to the bigger picture and take each day as it comes.
Extended parts of the film feel like a workplace comedy, or like the scene in American Psycho when the vice presidents compare fonts on their business cards. The banal duties of day-to-day life, the little emergencies which make up a career, well they happen whether you’re working in a paper company in Scranton or for a puppet regime enabling your invaders. Either way press releases have to be written, signs have to be made, and all those things involve lots of little decisions that take up a bunch of time. It’s the kind of ordinary work that doesn’t necessarily add up to much, especially if you’re so bogged down in the details the bigger picture doesn’t get your attention. And Henri is so focused on the leaves on the trees he stops noticing he’s inside a forest at all. And that means the significance of the gradual shift in tasks his work asks him to undergo is missed. But not by those of us watching.
The bravest choices within the film are the musical cues, which are not of the time but instead largely European dance or electro-pop. This adds a context very similar to that of the opening sequence in Jojo Rabbit, which directly compares the rise of Hitler to Beatlemania. But it’s not just that the music – which the characters can hear, and dance to – is setting a mood of bright-eyed foolishness. Those songs make it plain that these people are choosing to ignore reality around them for something as close as they can get to a good time. It’s as if the goofs from Parks & Recreation suddenly held your life in their hands while still pulling pranks and playing games with each other. For horror is often just comedy pushed that little bit too far, and it’s incredible how Mr. Marre builds a mood that stays on the right side of that line.
Where he succeeds less well is the ability to believe the audience will get the point. A Man of His Time is over two and a half hours long. Its point would land more sharply if it was made more sparingly. Throughout the runtime Mr. Arlaud here kind of turns off his leading-man appeal into something unusually interesting: Henri doesn’t understand why his good looks and intelligence don’t get him what he wants. The fact his intellect and his charm have come to the wrong conclusions and are being used for evil is obviously not the reason, but then what could it be?
At the end of the premiere, when Mr. Marre was handed the microphone and invited to make a statement, all he said – after making it clear this is all he’ll ever say – was “Plus jamais ça,” aka “Never again.” But of course it happens again – it’s happening again right now – because people don’t stop and wonder about what all their little choices add up to. If nothing else, maybe that lengthy runtime is meant to provide viewers with an opportunity for self-reflection. With A Man of His Time, Mr. Marre has cleared his conscience of his great-grandfather and that’s important indeed. Let’s hope this thoughtfully and truly funny film prompts more people to stop and think about how they’ll want to be remembered.
A Man of His Time recently played at the Cannes Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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