It is the story of how a lowly state administrator unthinkingly becomes a cog in the machine of an authoritarian regime, embracing the bureaucracy and logistics of sending people to their deaths – and it is drawing in audiences to French cinemas.
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it → become → cinemas
But the award-winning film about the daily lives of ordinary people participating in the puppet Vichy regime that collaborated with the Nazis – and ensured the deportation of a quarter of France’s Jewish population to concentration camps – is poised to become a box office hit.
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that → win → camps
The film, which has been given the English-language title A Man of His Time, had a strong cinema opening in France this week, particularly among young audiences, at a time when the country is soul-searching ahead of next spring’s presidential election.
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country → give → election
Marine Le Pen of the far-right, anti-immigration National Rally (RN) continues to top the polls for the presidential race despite the political fallout from an investigation by Mediapart alleging that her party leader, Jordan Bardella, published antisemitic comments as a young party member, which he denies.
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he → continue → which
Notre Salut comes amid a boom in films about France during the second world war, including more than 5m ticket sales for the two-part biopic of Charles de Gaulle, as well the controversial Les Rayons et les Ombres about the press baron and Nazi collaborator Jean Luchaire, and the forthcoming Moulin, about the last days of the French resistance leader Jean Moulin.
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Salut → come → leader
But rather than tackling well-known heroes or monsters, Notre Salut focuses instead on the role of ordinary people in the Vichy regime that, under Marshal Philippe Pétain, collaborated in the deportation of 76,000 Jewish people to Nazi concentration camps.
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that → tackle → camps
The film was inspired by a stash of family letters found by its writer and director, Emmanuel Marre, that gave insight into the life of his great-grandfather Henri Marre, who worked as an administrator under the authoritarian puppet regime.
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who → inspire → regime
“There are great figures who make history, but history is also made by the second-players, the grassroots who act on the ground, and that is what is interesting about this film,” said Marc Olivier Baruch, a historian and specialist on state administrators in the Vichy regime.
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Baruch → be → regime
For Baruch, the most chilling scene in the film is the bureaucratic nitpicking about the costs incurred by providing Jews on cattle trucks with straw and chamber pots.
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scene → incur → straw
The central character in the film, the administrator Henri Marre, “never chooses to reflect on things or look at what he’s doing, to wonder what his room for manoeuvre is”.
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room → choose → manoeuvre
Baruch said the film’s sense of unease was a pull for modern of audiences because today France was “in a time of great uncertainty …
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France → say → uncertainty
There’s a strong lack of confidence among French people in their elites and in their state and that has been going on for a long time.”
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that → ’ → time
He said the Vichy regime had resonance today as a period in history.
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regime → say → history
There were these four years at the heart of the 20th century when the far right was in power and clearly for French people in 2026 and 2027 that is interesting …
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that → be → 2026
There has been a certain unease in modern France that it would be better to stop talking about Vichy, to draw a line under it, stop the masochism [of looking back].
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it → stop → masochism
Film critics suggested modern audiences were seeking to better understand the rise of the far right across Europe and in France.
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audiences → suggest → France
Henry Rousso, a historian who has studied the place of the Vichy regime in collective memory, wrote of the film in Le Monde: “The RN is not the fascism of the 1930s, nor a resurgence of the Pétain regime, but knowing this history allows an understanding of what [the RN] is the heir to, and how the mechanisms of gradually renouncing democratic and republican values led to disaster.”
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mechanisms → study → disaster
Emmanuel Marre, the film’s writer-director, who won the best Screenplay prize at the Cannes film festival, began working on the story more than a decade ago after the discovery of the letters from his great-grandfather that his family had kept in a drawer.
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family → win → drawer
He told France Inter radio: “There are [similar] drawers everywhere in France … there is a phantom memory of the collaboration.
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He → tell → collaboration
With this film, we wanted to prise open those drawers and allow all families to look at that – not as flagellation, [but] because after the war France pushed a lot of it under the carpet to survive.”
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France → want → carpet
He said it was crucial to look at the nuance of what led people to collaborate or take a stand.
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what → say → stand
The Aporia
