In these terrible, wounded times, when geopolitical upheaval has consequences so personal we might trip over them at our own doorsteps, and when our own attempts to live normal lives come freighted with guilt that we’re essentially dancing while others die, there is sobering value in a film like Emmanuel Marre‘s unsparing “A Man of His Time,” the director’s solo feature debut after co-directing 2021’s impressively scathing “Zero Fucks Given.” This World War II-era drama, rather than celebrating or vilifying the heroic/villainous stories of the exceptional few, shifts focus onto a representative of the unexceptional many — a man “of his time” who, through his actions and silences and willful self-delusion, reaps the benefits of an evil ideology without ever believing himself to be its fellow traveller.
Dancing while others die, Henri Marre (an outstanding Swann Arlaud) is at a party, where as a new arrival to Vichy he is trying to insinuate himself into the inner circles of the bureaucracy supporting Pétain’s puppet government, established following the 1940 fall of France to the Germans. Henri gets drunk and ornery, and causes raised eyebrows with his gauche declarations of patriotism and his insistence on promoting his self-published book of Pétainist propaganda, titled Notre Salut (“Our Salvation”), to unimpressed revellers.
