JIFF26 A Man Of His Time

Winner of Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival, director Emmanuel Marre’s biopic of an engineer who slinks his way into the Vichy administration after the fall of the French government is based on his own great-grandfather's life and uses real letters between his great-grandparents as its basis. In September 1940, Henri Marre arrives in Vichy broke and estranged from his family as the authoritarian regime settles in. Carrying copies of his self-published manifesto ‘Notre Salut’ (‘Our Salvation’, also the film’s French title), he is determined to secure what he believes to be his rightful position in the new administration, using a methodology that melds his patriotic convictions and engineer’s mind: efficiency above all. Grounded by an astounding performance from Swann Arlaud (Anatomy of a Fall), A Man of His Time blends period accuracy with distinctly modern camerawork and anachronistic needle-drops to create a slow-burn portrait of the banality of evil in the vein of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest.