A Man of His Time

Emmanuel Marre's Notre salut arrived in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival in 2026, where it won the Best Screenplay prize. The director had previously co-directed the well-received Zero Fucks Given (2021) with Julie Lecoustre; this is his most ambitious solo feature, a 155-minute French–Belgian production that reaches into one of the most uncomfortable corners of twentieth-century French history.

The film follows Henri Marre, a man of forty-nine who arrives in Vichy with no money and no connections, carrying a self-published political treatise in which he sets out his patriotic convictions and his engineer's certainties. He sees in the collaborationist administration the chance to become, at last, someone who matters. Swann Arlaud plays him without caricature or exculpation, and Marre stages the period not as costume spectacle but as a study of ordinary ambition curdling into complicity.

By focusing on a minor functionary rather than the architects of the regime, Notre salut joins a lineage of French cinema — from Lacombe, Lucien onward — that examines collaboration through small, recognisable men. Its Cannes reception was strong: alongside the screenplay prize it collected the Art et Essai award and a technical citation. Restrained, lucid and quietly damning, it confirms Marre as one of the more serious new voices in Francophone cinema.