This, oddly, is the second film in the Cannes competition about the Nazi occupation of France, and it is more interesting than László Nemes’s rather mainstream drama Moulin – a complex, ambiguous study of national humiliation from writer-director Emmanuel Marre. He has created an absorbingly intimate, novelistically detailed procedural about the day-to-day, moment-by-moment lives of the Vichy administrators after the fall of France, mostly shot conventionally, sometimes jolting into an anachronistic dreamlike scenario on video.
It is centred on the director’s own great-grandfather Henri Marre, who held a minor but important post in the Vichy ministry of labour. The film is in fact unsparing of this conceited, petty, but weirdly sensitive and vulnerable man: Swann Arlaud plays him as a sociopathic mixture of haughty idealist, salon intellectual and conman predator, a man who doesn’t really believe in anything but his own survival and has only the vaguest idea about what such survival could mean.
