{"id":682349,"date":"2026-05-20T17:26:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T17:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/682349\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T17:26:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T17:26:10","slug":"a-man-of-his-time-review-cannes-docudrama-explores-fascism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/682349\/","title":{"rendered":"A Man of His Time Review: Cannes Docudrama Explores Fascism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hannah Arendt\u2019s old adage about evil has grown banal from overuse, though it finds interesting new ripples in Emmanuel Marre\u2019s \u201cA Man of His Time.\u201d Not that the central anti-hero is particularly malevolent \u2014 he\u2019s simply a middle-aged mediocrity who turns to Vichy collaboration to reboot a stalled career. More ignominious still, he barely gets far, stalling out again at lower middle-management, just another interchangeable cog in a machine that doesn\u2019t need him, will go on without him and will crush him all the same.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Premiering in Cannes\u2019 competition, this odd-duck docudrama marks a decided change of pace for a filmmaker whose previous study in anomie was titled \u201cZero Fucks Given.\u201d Here, one senses that Marre cares an awful lot \u2014 and carries no small burden \u2014 following a character based on his own great-grandfather.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Henri Marre (Swann Arlaud) stumbles into the film already slightly soused. France has fallen, and a new government is coalescing in the spa town of Vichy under the octogenarian Mar\u00e9chal P\u00e9tain. There\u2019s work to be had for unscrupulous men \u2014 even those coming off a recently collapsed business venture that ended in professional disgrace. Unfortunately for Henri, there is rather less work for ideologues, as dyed-in-the-wool P\u00e9tainistes raise eyebrows in a government born of defeat and staffed by cynics who prefer the reliability of fellow rogues. Not five minutes in, our awkward arriviste has badly overplayed his hand.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Kiyoshi\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

Henri\u2019s great-grandson, though, has already got us hooked \u2014 tracking his protagonist as he poorly works the room with visual language that feels wildly discordant with the period. (For clarity\u2019s sake, we\u2019ll use the first name for the character and the surname for the filmmaker.) Marre follows Henri like a nightclub photographer, using a handheld camera and harsh on-camera flash, subjects washed out in its immediate glare and swallowed by pools of shadow. The aesthetic calls to mind early-2000s party shoots, or the deep seediness of Girls Gone Wild, and it comes as part of the filmmaker\u2019s wider plan to bridge the eight decades separating the two Marres.<\/p>\n

In certain key respects, the film employs a similar logic to \u201cThe Zone of Interest,\u201d collapsing then-and-now with an aesthetic far removed from the standard historical drama. Whereas Jonathan Glazer used eerie distancing to accent alienation, Marre wants his viewers to recognize something all too familiar \u2014 especially because the film\u2019s many discourses about appeasement and fascist rapprochement are hardly limited to the past. (A wink the film\u2019s English subtitles make toward international viewers with a line about \u201cmaking France great again\u201d that doesn\u2019t quite match the French dialogue spoken on-screen.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Much of that dialogue was improvised on the spot, as Marre apparently wrote a detailed script then forbade his actors from learning much of it. Running 155 minutes, the film plays as a grim picaresque, following Henri from Vichy \u2014 where the new government has overtaken the local thermal baths, giving gray bureaucrats the chance to plot new trade routes from the shvitz \u2014 then to Paris, and ultimately to Limoges, where he is made sub-prefect for a politico already on the outs, at a ministry of, shall we say, secondary importance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Less rise-and-fall than lurch-and-plant, the film uses its caught-on-the-fly quality to accent the mundane. The gears of fascism were turned by unexceptional stiffs just punching the clock, and even within these systems there were winners and losers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But even the hapless can feed atrocity \u2014 a fact that crystallizes through the film\u2019s extended middle section following Henri at work. He sits behind his desk placing calls, issuing orders, and competently administrating what we gradually come to realize is the transport of people. That Marre shoots his bumbling middle-manager with an extraordinarily familiar shorthand of handheld cameras and rapid zooms only sharpens the film\u2019s ironic bite. This is \u201cThe Office: Genocide.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA Man of His Time\u201d relays a dark subject with a playful spirit, leaning into anachronistic music cues setting archival footage against Opus\u2019 \u201cLive is Life,\u201d or having characters break into dance to \u201cPopcorn\u201d by Hot Butter. But it turns mournful when focusing on Henri\u2019s domestic life. He has four children and a wife \u2014 played by Sandrine Blancke \u2014 who lets us into her emotional life through a series of letters, read in voiceover and drawn from the real family archive. For all his limited political talent, Henri leaves his mark on the world all the same, with a moral stain that has outlasted everything else about him, and a uniquely marred legacy.<\/p>\n

\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Diamond\"\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hannah Arendt\u2019s old adage about evil has grown banal from overuse, though it finds interesting new ripples in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":682350,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[250356,49,48,43877,5328,75,337],"class_list":["post-682349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-a-man-of-his-time","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cannes","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=682349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682349\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/682350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}