Ever since Louis Malle’s masterful Lacombe Lucien was lambasted by critics during its 1974 release, more or less pushing Malle into artistic self-exile in the years that followed, French cinema has generally shied away from stories dealing with Nazi collaborators.

This is partly because it’s hard to make a film about such an unlikeable character: Who wants to watch two hours of someone saluting Hitler and willingly sending Jews off to the concentration camp? It’s also because France still has a hard time reckoning with WWII, which involved heroic acts by both the Resistance and its exiled leadership (the subject of two high-profile Cannes entries this year, Moulin and De Gaulle: Tilting Iron), but also acts of cowardice, or worse, by those who supported the Vichy regime.

However, this year has seen two sprawling and ambitious Gallic dramas that have tackled the Nazi collaboration head-on, from different angles and with entirely different results.

The first was Xavier Giannoli’s bloated 200-minute biopic The Rays and Shadows, which chronicled the dirty wartime dealings of press magnate Jean Luchaire (played by Jean Dujardin) and his matinee idol daughter, Corinne. Both polished and punishing, Giannoli’s film attempted to simultaneously condemn its protagonists, and, if not necessarily redeem them, to at least make us empathize with some of their suffering. The result was a work that never managed to find a coherent point-of-view, which didn’t prevent it from taking in a decent $7 million at the local box office, or from stirring up controversy.

The second movie, A Man of His Time (Notre Salut), is also the epic tale of a collaborator — although this one happens to be the great-grandfather of writer-director Emmanuel Marre, who gets upgraded to Cannes’ competition this year after his memorable debut, Zero F***s Given (co-directed with Julie Lecoustre), played in the Critics’ Week back in 2021.

It’s hard to categorize Marre’s second feature, which is ostensibly a period piece but seems more contemporary, like a grungy indie flick in which everyone wears old sports suits and vintage hairstyles yet behaves very much the way people do now. The film feels fresh and off-the-cuff, as if someone traveled back to 1940 with an iPhone and hit record, chronicling the dark years of far-right obedience and moral decadence.

The film can also feel infuriating — quite intentionally so. Marre pulls no punches with his unesteemed ancestor, Henri Marre (Swann Arlaud), a writer, engineer, and rather pathetic social climber who would do anything to get ahead, including whatever the Nazi-supporting leadership required of him when he served as their faithful employee. Swaths of the movie are therefore dedicated to watching him execute mundane middle-management tasks or sit through yawn-inducing meetings with his staff and superiors, as if to underline the utter mediocrity of the whole fascist endeavor in France.

The story kicks off in 1940 in the midst of a party (think Visconti’s The Damned, but far less extravagant) filled with officials and arrivistes who’ve descended to the spa city of Vichy, where a collaborationist government lead by aging WWI hero Philippe Petain has been set up in the southern Free Zone. (Paris and the north remain occupied by the German army).

Among them we spot Henri, dressed to the nines and looking to make some contacts, like a pharmaceutical salesman at a medical convention (or, perhaps, a producer at a party in Cannes). Too eager to please when he’s not being an insufferable know-it-all, he walks around plugging his latest book, Notre Salut (Our Salvation, which may have been a better English-language title for the film), a technocratic treatise that promises to rejuvenate the French economy under Nazi control.

Cinematographer Olivier Boonjing lights the party sequence with garish photofloods, as if he were shooting videos to be posted later on TikTok. It’s a jarring effect at first — as are some of the film’s music choices, which highlight ‘80s-era hits by Opus (“Life Is Life”) and Alphaville (“Sounds like a Melody”) that deliberately clash with the time period — much in the way that Josh Safdie used modern pop classics, including another Alphaville track, in Marty Supreme.

The link between past and present is surely deliberate on Marre’s part, who’s trying to depict occupied France through the prism of today. If directors like him and Giannoli have chosen to revisit the debacles of the Vichy era, it can only be because their country is currently facing a similar political upheaveal — one that, in the next presidential election, could see its first far-right head of state since Petain.

This sentiment looms over much of A Man of His Time, which painstakingly chronicles Henri’s rise from unknown author to — and this is the best he can get — regional director of the Free Zone’s unemployment agency. Working in a converted building out of the nondescript city of Limoges, he rules over an unruly staff that includes a hapless secretary (Mathilde Abd-El-Kader) and a Jewish right-hand man (Harpo Guit), who provide moments of comic relief, as if they were performing in a spinoff of The Office decorated with swastika banners. 

And yet, there is nothing funny about what Henri is up to down there, especially when he agrees to round up foreign workers into labor camps, and, in one unforgivable instance, signs off on transports shipping Jewish families toward the east. You can tell he has some misgivings about this, because despite everything he accepts as a Vichy official, Henri isn’t exactly evil — he’s just weak and banal.

Arlaud, who played the family lawyer in Anatomy of a Fall, gives a career-best performance here, revealing his character’s deep yearnings and fear of failure. Henri is so afraid to fall out of step with those in charge (including his deadpan boss, played by the director’s brother, Jean-Baptiste Marre) that he’s willing to throw everyone else under the bus — and sometimes on a train to Auschwitz.

Henri also wants to desperately please his wife, Paulette (Sandrine Blancke), with whom he has a tumultuous marriage that’s first introduced through an epistolary voiceover. (Marre based his script on the actual correspondence between his great-grandparents.) The two no longer share much passion together, and Paulette mostly sees Henri as a loser who failed at several business ventures before arriving in Vichy and trying to make a name for himself.

The action in the film’s second half shifts back and forth between the day-to-day dealings at the unemployment office and life on the homefront once Paulette and the kids show up in Limoges. Neither setting brings Henri much happiness, even if he and Paulette manage to temporarily rekindle their love — that is until she learns about what he’s been up to at work. The fact that the highlight of Henri’s wartime experience seems to be the moment Petain arrives in Limoges for a parade, only to shun him during a meet-and-greet afterwards, reveals to what extent all his efforts were in vain.

Not long after that happens, the Allies invade Normandy and the whole regime is about to crumble, leaving Henri and his fellow collabos to either flee for the nearest border or face a firing squad. “Nothing remarkable will ever happen to you,” a drunken palm reader tells Henri at that first party in Vichy, and in a sense he was right: Henri’s trajectory is mostly unexceptional, even if he lived through exceptional times. But he decided to side with the wrong team, condemning him to the blacklist of French history.

A cardinal rule in dramaturgy is not to judge your characters, but in A Man of His Time, Marre is unequivocal about his great-grandfather, portraying him as a craven mediocrity who put his career above everything else, including other human lives. And yet, the director manages to show some compassion for Henri as well — not because he respects or admires him, but because he sees him as so helplessly flawed, so desperate to succeed. By telling Henri’s shameful story, he seems to be asking everyone watching what they would have done in his place back then. And, perhaps, now.