Swann Arlaud plays an oddball bureaucrat is in over his head in this post-war French drama based on the filmmaker’s own great grandparents.
This is a film which argues that the notion of patriotism and political pride can only ever lead to personal ruin, as regimes rise and fall and leaders who start off as vainglorious godheads often end up as pathetic miscreants. Sound familiar? It’s all set amid the morally dismal machinations of the Vichy government, led by World War One hero Marshal Pétain from 1941 and which saw a demoralised France forced to heel to German occupying forces. Such are the fervent political passions of bookish everyman Henri Marre (Swann Arlaud), he is moved to write a pamphlet of his ideas which he calls ‘Notre Salut’ (translation: “Our Salvation”), which he eventually uses as an ad-hoc CV to carve out a cushy job in the collaborationist government and raise France from out of its mire.
Emmanuel Marre’s film is inspired by a cachet of letters written to and from Henri and his wife Paulette, played here with a smoky insouciance by Sandrine Blancke. Despite possessing an overabundance of pep and willing, Henri seems to float from one financially ruinous disaster to the next. Prior to this new gig he has already squandered his wife’s considerable inheritance on his various schemes in attempts to be taken seriously as a government agent who’s willing to actually enact his ideology. Yet as played by Arlaud, the’s something quite affable and innocent about Henri, and the film is more about the ways in which his tragic idealism is wiped away as Germany tightens its stranglehold on France.
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It’s a handsome if slow-moving film, often one that – like Henri – is dazzled by small details while dispensing with a bigger picture. Perhaps recognising that this material is grist to the prestige historical drama mill, Marre inserts little post-modern interludes, such as 1980s electropop bangers on the soundtrack and bizarre dance sequence set to ‘Popcorn’ which looks like it was bussed in directly from a Yorgos Lanthimos film. There are also some sequences that are filmed vérite-style that resemble a ’90s fashion-shoot, with strong directional spotlights behind the camera causing the subjects to flinch like they’re being caught off-guard. While these moments might provide some jazzy outtakes for the trailer, they sit uncomfortably within a film whose wider intent seems more studious and sober.
It’s engrossing to a degree, yet there’s always the feeling that Marre fails to capitalise on the intense, messy drama of the situation, and Henri’s own rise and fall is framed as something of a banal inevitability. The arc of the film closes at the point where the letters dry up, and perhaps one fatal flaw here is that the relationship between Henri and Paulette is never truly defined, and beyond the fact that they have three kids, she is given scant reason to potentially ruin her own life by supporting him. How the history unfolds and the fates of various political personalities is informative and interesting, but the film lacks for a more dynamic perspective on this extraordinary moment in time.
