Notre Salut, the second film at Cannes about the Nazi occupation of France, offers a more complex and ambiguous study than Laszlo Nemes' mainstream drama Moulin. Writer-director Emmanuel Marre crafts an absorbingly intimate, novelistically detailed procedural about the day-to-day lives of Vichy administrators after France's fall, blending conventional shooting with anachronistic dreamlike video sequences.
A Portrait of a Flawed Ancestor
The film centers on the director's great-grandfather, Henri Marre, a minor but significant figure in the Vichy ministry of labour. Swann Arlaud delivers an excellent performance as this conceited, petty, yet oddly sensitive and vulnerable man. He embodies a sociopathic mix of haughty idealist, salon intellectual, and predatory conman, driven solely by survival with little understanding of what that survival entails.
Bureaucracy and Moral Blindness
The narrative follows Marre and his colleagues in near real-time as they engage in seemingly innocuous administrative tasks. Gradually, with frog-boiling speed, they realize their role in organizing the transportation of Jews—initially called "ramassage" (roundup) but coyly renamed "rassemblement" (collective relocation). A bureaucratic row erupts over the cost of providing straw and chamber pots for Jews in cattle trucks.
The Vichy apparatchiks are delusional and avoidant, clinging to the idea of salvaging patriotic survival from the Nazi invasion by building a new France as reactionary and antisemitic as Germany. This serves both to cauterize their humiliation and to appease the Nazis into maintaining the supposed "free zone" in the south under Marshal Petain's defanged leadership.
Marre's Opportunistic Rise
Marre arrives in Vichy France penniless, a slippery entrepreneur who has squandered his wife's family fortune and investors' money. He leaves his wife and children behind, while her angry letters (presumably genuine) are read in voiceover. He sees France's catastrophe as a chance to reinvent himself as a national visionary, brandishing copies of his self-published manifesto "Notre Salut" (Our Salvation).
He wheedles into Vichy soirees, embarrassing hosts with his contempt for Nazis and excessive Petain hero-worship. Like a tsarist petitioner, he loiters in ministerial offices seeking a job, endearing himself to a senior figure by rescuing his cat from behind the demarcation zone—a farcically undignified task.
In the Ministry
Once employed, Marre shows instinctive flair for middle-management leadership and maudlin Petain-worship, supervising the hanging of a mural about France's new mission. He busies himself with trivial tasks to impose power and curate his career, teaching the public to shout pro-Petain slogans and auditioning secretaries, whimsically choosing the laziest and least competent to avoid being overshadowed. His elegant wife Paulette (Sandrine Blancke) joins him with their children in a handsome apartment formerly owned by a Jewish family.
The Inevitable Fall
With terrible inevitability, Marre realizes Vichy France's independence is a sham. His responsibility for forced labor is overruled by the Germans' chilling Organisation Todt. The Germans insist on antisemitic roundups, and his superiors grow panicky, demanding obedience. As D-day dawns, Marre reverts to type, buying abandoned businesses with government cash and pocketing a larcenous commission, left a pathetic, lonely figure deserted by family and all.
Marre's film gives a shrewd, painful account of what Marcel Ophuls called "the sorrow and the pity": the Vichy administrators' self-pity and doomy sorrow at their own misfortune. Arlaud excels as an intelligent, talented man who almost, but not quite, realizes the terrible swamp he has descended into. Notre Salut screened at the Cannes film festival.
