French film about Vichy bureaucrats resonates as nation faces far-right electoral surge

A French film about the machinery of complicity is drawing audiences into cinemas across the country this week, arriving at a moment when the nation is bracing for a presidential election that could reshape its political future. Notre Salut—released in English as A Man of His Time—tells the story of an ordinary state administrator who, without apparent moral reckoning, becomes a functionary in the Vichy regime's apparatus of deportation. The film is not a costume drama in the traditional sense. It uses modern lighting, improvised dialogue, and an incongruous 1980s Europop soundtrack to strip away the distance that historical pageantry usually provides. Instead, it forces viewers to sit with the mundane horror of bureaucratic participation: a scene in which administrators nitpick the cost of straw and chamber pots for Jews being transported in cattle trucks to concentration camps.

The film's timing is not accidental. France is in the grip of electoral anxiety. Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally continues to lead polling for next spring's presidential race, even as the party faces scrutiny following allegations that its leader, Jordan Bardella, published antisemitic comments in his youth—claims he denies. Against this backdrop, a film about how ordinary people became cogs in an authoritarian machine has found an audience, particularly among younger viewers. The Vichy regime, under Marshal Philippe Pétain, collaborated in the deportation of 76,000 Jewish people to Nazi concentration camps, representing roughly a quarter of France's Jewish population at the time.

Director Emmanuel Marre drew the story from family letters discovered in a drawer—correspondence from his great-grandfather Henri Marre, who worked as an administrator under the puppet regime. The film won the best screenplay prize at Cannes. Marre has said he began the project more than a decade ago, but the letters themselves had been kept by his family for generations, part of what he calls the "phantom memory of collaboration" that France has largely avoided confronting. In an interview with France Inter radio, he described the film as an attempt to open those drawers—not as an exercise in national self-flagellation, but as a necessary reckoning with nuance. "In between resistance and collaboration," he said, "there is a whole range of human emotions, even the most ambiguous."

Historians have noted the film's resonance with contemporary anxieties. Marc Olivier Baruch, a specialist in Vichy-era state administrators, observed that the film's central character never pauses to reflect on his actions or consider what choices might have been available to him. For Baruch, this passivity is precisely what makes the film unsettling to modern audiences. France, he argues, is experiencing "a time of great uncertainty." There is widespread loss of confidence in elites and institutions—a condition that has persisted for years. The Vichy period, he noted, represents the only moment since 1820 when the far right held power in France. Those four years sit at the heart of the twentieth century, and for French citizens in 2026 and 2027, that history carries weight.

Henry Rousso, a historian who has studied how the Vichy regime lives in French collective memory, wrote in Le Monde that understanding this history is essential precisely because the National Rally is not a simple resurgence of 1930s fascism or Pétainism. Rather, knowing the mechanisms by which democratic and republican values gradually eroded into authoritarianism allows citizens to recognize what the contemporary far right is heir to. The film has arrived amid a broader surge in French cinema about the Second World War—the two-part de Gaulle biopic drew more than five million ticket sales, and other films about collaboration and resistance are in production or recently released.

Baruch pushed back against the notion that France should simply move past Vichy, drawing a line under it and ceasing what some call the masochism of historical self-examination. That impulse, he said, is both understandable and impossible. The film, in its refusal to offer easy moral categories or heroic narratives, seems to be asking audiences to sit with the discomfort of that impossibility. Marre's point about the drawers in French homes—the suppressed family stories, the letters kept but not discussed—suggests that this reckoning is not new. It has been waiting, deferred, for decades. The film's box office success indicates that audiences are ready, or perhaps that the political moment has made readiness unavoidable.