Presented In Official Competition On May 20 At Cannes, "Notre Salut" is Emmanuel Marre’s second feature film. It follows, in France in 1940, the trajectory of a low-level civil servant. He finds in Vichy fertile ground for his rise. Carried by Swann Arlaud and nourished by family archives, the film focuses less on the regime’s pinnacles than on its offices, its routines, and the language of administration.
A Film That Shifts The Gaze On Vichy
It’s as much a choice of setting as a moral choice. With "Notre Salut", Emmanuel Marre neither films the major figures of power nor the most expected emblems of collaboration. He focuses on a second-tier man, Henri Marre, who enters History quietly. Not by the crash of spectacular decisions, but by the diligent use of procedures.
The Festival de Cannes sheet specifies that the film, co-produced by France and Belgium, runs 155 minutes and places its story in September 1940. Henri arrives in Vichy without money, far from his family. He carries under his arm a self-published political treatise titled Notre Salut. The whole issue is already there. In this faith in efficiency. In this conviction that a national catastrophe can become a personal opportunity. Above all, in this way of dressing ambition in a service vocabulary.
The subject is not new. The way of approaching it is more so. Emmanuel Marre starts from intimate material. In his Festival interview, he says his great-grandfather was a civil servant under Vichy. He adds that a book, letters, and a zone of silence remained in the family. Yet the film presents itself neither as a filiation investigation nor as a domestic trial. It transforms this origin into a cinematic question and, more broadly, into a civic question.
This shift is decisive. "Notre Salut" does not only ask what collaboration was. It asks what it looks like when observed at desk level. When it takes the form of a file to be processed, it can be an instruction to pass on. It can also be a skill to assert or a promotion to seize.
The Gray Power Of Procedures
This is where the film is most unsettling. Franceinfo describes a progressive shift of the character toward functions related to workforce management, to registration. Moreover, he moves toward sorting and routing in a context where Vichy’s antisemitic policy is taking hold. The narrative, as presented, does not rest on a sudden ideological conversion. It shows instead a continuity of tasks, reflexes, and justifications.
This continuity strips collaboration of any convenient dimension. It no longer presents it as a monstrous exception, immediately noticeable, but as a series of adjustments, obediences, and self-interests. "Notre Salut" does not claim to document the full historical complexity of Vichy by itself. It isolates a mechanism. It shows how a regime becomes workable for those who do not see themselves as executioners.
The historical detour illuminates the argument. Vichy’s administrations were not mere scenery around political decisions. They were one of their instruments. Workforce management and the growing control of society produced a particular universe. Furthermore, the rise of coercive policies engendered a world where order and efficiency dominated. However, that language covered realities that grew increasingly violent. The film clearly situates itself in that perspective. It does not seek the spectacular. It focuses on the ordinary.
The Festival de Cannes evokes a "documentary proximity" and an "administrative grotesque" rather than a historical fresco. The phrase clarifies the project. Emmanuel Marre seems to prefer corridors to podiums, offices to ceremonies, tiny compromises to grand declarations. Early reactions thus describe a sensation of suffocation more lasting than what more demonstrative effects would allow.
Within this framework, the film convinces first because it refrains from exaggerating features. It does not make the civil servant an immediately readable demonic figure. It is interested in an active docility, in moral availability, in a way of making a career in a world that is falling apart. This is not a thesis film. It is an observational film.
Swann Arlaud, Close To A Conscience That Slips Away
An actor capable of holding that ambiguity was still needed. Swann Arlaud, according to early articles about the film, composes here a character without overload. The role demands never to absolve Henri Marre, but also not to reduce him to a period silhouette. He must remain a man, otherwise the experience offered to the viewer would lose its force.
TF1 Info speaks of an "astonishing portrait of a Vichy civil servant." The phrase sums up fairly well what the film seeks. Not the absolute strangeness of evil, but its familiar part. It is not the enigma of a monster, but the trajectory of a man who adapts and rises. Then he tells himself he serves a necessary order. He discovers too late, or not at all, what he agreed to serve.
Swann Arlaud has a rare quality for this. He knows how to make opacity exist without making it abstract. His performance lets calculation, hunger for recognition, the need to consider himself legitimate surface. He does not impose a psychology. He establishes a movement. It is this movement that interests Emmanuel Marre. The passage from application to compromise. The moment when competence becomes endorsement.
In that respect, "Notre Salut" exceeds the mere frame of the historical film. It questions a language and a behavior. The language of necessity, order, and efficiency. The behavior of those who never think of themselves on the side of guilt, because they see themselves as serious executors. Cinema has often represented barbarism by its outbursts. Emmanuel Marre looks for it, instead, in its prose.
There is a delicate ridge line here. A film of this type can easily lock itself into demonstration. Conversely, it can also be fascinated by the drabness of state apparatuses. At this stage, Notre Salut seems to escape this double trap. The film keeps its center on a man, a trajectory, and choices that are not spectacular. However, that makes them all the more disturbing.
A Work Of Memory, But Without Monumentality
This may be what most distinctly sets the film apart in the Cannes landscape. "Notre Salut" does not treat the past as a sacred block nor as a prestigious backdrop. It makes it embarrassing again. It reminds us that authoritarian regimes advance not only through ideological fervor or visible brutality. They also advance through well-run offices, tidy words, and the careers they offer to those who want to count.
The title itself sums up this ambiguity. It sounds like a collective promise, almost like a slogan of recovery. But that salvation first appears to be that of an individual seeking to remake himself in a ruined world. The word gathers on the surface. It hides an interest, then a compromise. This shift gives the film a singular political density.
Ultimately, Emmanuel Marre signs less a history lesson than a film of vigilance. He reminds that political catastrophes do not always present themselves in the expected guise of excess. They can take the face of order, method, and advancement. It is there that "Notre Salut" finds its most disturbing reach.
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