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‘A Man of His Time’ Review: Swann Arlaud as French Nazi Collaborator

Published

3 months ago

May 20, 2026

Ever since Louis Malle’s masterful Lacombe Lucien was lambasted by critics during its 1974 release, more or less pushing Malle into artistic self-exile in the years that followed, French cinema has generally shied away from stories dealing with Nazi collaborators.

This is partly because it’s hard to make a film about such an unlikeable character: Who wants to watch two hours of someone saluting Hitler and willingly sending Jews off to the concentration camp? It’s also because France still has a hard time reckoning with WWII, which involved heroic acts by both the Resistance and its exiled leadership (the subject of two high-profile Cannes entries this year, Moulin and De Gaulle: Tilting Iron), but also acts of cowardice, or worse, by those who supported the Vichy regime.

A Man of His Time

The Bottom Line

A scathingly fresh look at wartime fascism.

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Swann Arlaud, Sandrine Blancke, Mathieur Perotto, Harpo Guit, Mathilde Abd-El-Kader, Jean-Baptiste Marre
Director, screenwriter: Emmanuel Marre

2 hours 35 minutes

However, this year has seen two sprawling and ambitious Gallic dramas that have tackled the Nazi collaboration head-on, from different angles and with entirely different results.

The first was Xavier Giannoli’s bloated 200-minute biopic The Rays and Shadows, which chronicled the dirty wartime dealings of press magnate Jean Luchaire (played by Jean Dujardin) and his matinee idol daughter, Corinne. Both polished and punishing, Giannoli’s film attempted to simultaneously condemn its protagonists, and, if not necessarily redeem them, to at least make us empathize with some of their suffering. The result was a work that never managed to find a coherent point-of-view, which didn’t prevent it from taking in a decent $7 million at the local box office, or from stirring up controversy.

The second movie, A Man of His Time (Notre Salut), is also the epic tale of a collaborator — although this one happens to be the great-grandfather of writer-director Emmanuel Marre, who gets upgraded to Cannes’ competition this year after his memorable debut, Zero F***s Given (co-directed with Julie Lecoustre), played in the Critics’ Week back in 2021.

It’s hard to categorize Marre’s second feature, which is ostensibly a period piece but seems more contemporary, like a grungy indie flick in which everyone wears old sports suits and vintage hairstyles yet behaves very much the way people do now. The film feels fresh and off-the-cuff, as if someone traveled back to 1940 with an iPhone and hit record, chronicling the dark years of far-right obedience and moral decadence.

The film can also feel infuriating — quite intentionally so. Marre pulls no punches with his unesteemed ancestor, Henri Marre (Swann Arlaud), a writer, engineer, and rather pathetic social climber who would do anything to get ahead, including whatever the Nazi-supporting leadership required of him when he served as their faithful employee. Swaths of the movie are therefore dedicated to watching him execute mundane middle-management tasks or sit through yawn-inducing meetings with his staff and superiors, as if to underline the utter mediocrity of the whole fascist endeavor in France.

The story kicks off in 1940 in the midst of a party (think Visconti’s The Damned, but far less extravagant) filled with officials and arrivistes who’ve descended to the spa city of Vichy, where a collaborationist government lead by aging WWI hero Philippe Petain has been set up in the southern Free Zone. (Paris and the north remain occupied by the German army).

Among them we spot Henri, dressed to the nines and looking to make some contacts, like a pharmaceutical salesman at a medical convention (or, perhaps, a producer at a party in Cannes). Too eager to please when he’s not being an insufferable know-it-all, he walks around plugging his latest book, Notre Salut (Our Salvation, which may have been a better English-language title for the film), a technocratic treatise that promises to rejuvenate the French economy under Nazi control.

Cinematographer Olivier Boonjing lights the party sequence with garish photofloods, as if he were shooting videos to be posted later on TikTok. It’s a jarring effect at first — as are some of the film’s music choices, which highlight ‘80s-era hits by Opus (“Life Is Life”) and Alphaville (“Sounds like a Melody”) that deliberately clash with the time period — much in the way that Josh Safdie used modern pop classics, including another Alphaville track, in Marty Supreme.

The link between past and present is surely deliberate on Marre’s part, who’s trying to depict occupied France through the prism of today. If directors like him and Giannoli have chosen to revisit the debacles of the Vichy era, it can only be because their country is currently facing a similar political upheaveal — one that, in the next presidential election, could see its first far-right head of state since Petain.

This sentiment looms over much of A Man of His Time, which painstakingly chronicles Henri’s rise from unknown author to — and this is the best he can get — regional director of the Free Zone’s unemployment agency. Working in a converted building out of the nondescript city of Limoges, he rules over an unruly staff that includes a hapless secretary (Mathilde Abd-El-Kader) and a Jewish right-hand man (Harpo Guit), who provide moments of comic relief, as if they were performing in a spinoff of The Office decorated with swastika banners.

And yet, there is nothing funny about what Henri is up to down there, especially when he agrees to round up foreign workers into labor camps, and, in one unforgivable instance, signs off on transports shipping Jewish families toward the east. You can tell he has some misgivings about this, because despite everything he accepts as a Vichy official, Henri isn’t exactly evil — he’s just weak and banal.

Arlaud, who played the family lawyer in Anatomy of a Fall, gives a career-best performance here, revealing his character’s deep yearnings and fear of failure. Henri is so afraid to fall out of step with those in charge (including his deadpan boss, played by the director’s brother, Jean-Baptiste Marre) that he’s willing to throw everyone else under the bus — and sometimes on a train to Auschwitz.

Henri also wants to desperately please his wife, Paulette (Sandrine Blancke), with whom he has a tumultuous marriage that’s first introduced through an epistolary voiceover. (Marre based his script on the actual correspondence between his great-grandparents.) The two no longer share much passion together, and Paulette mostly sees Henri as a loser who failed at several business ventures before arriving in Vichy and trying to make a name for himself.

The action in the film’s second half shifts back and forth between the day-to-day dealings at the unemployment office and life on the homefront once Paulette and the kids show up in Limoges. Neither setting brings Henri much happiness, even if he and Paulette manage to temporarily rekindle their love — that is until she learns about what he’s been up to at work. The fact that the highlight of Henri’s wartime experience seems to be the moment Petain arrives in Limoges for a parade, only to shun him during a meet-and-greet afterwards, reveals to what extent all his efforts were in vain.

Not long after that happens, the Allies invade Normandy and the whole regime is about to crumble, leaving Henri and his fellow collabos to either flee for the nearest border or face a firing squad. “Nothing remarkable will ever happen to you,” a drunken palm reader tells Henri at that first party in Vichy, and in a sense he was right: Henri’s trajectory is mostly unexceptional, even if he lived through exceptional times. But he decided to side with the wrong team, condemning him to the blacklist of French history.

A cardinal rule in dramaturgy is not to judge your characters, but in A Man of His Time, Marre is unequivocal about his great-grandfather, portraying him as a craven mediocrity who put his career above everything else, including other human lives. And yet, the director manages to show some compassion for Henri as well — not because he respects or admires him, but because he sees him as so helplessly flawed, so desperate to succeed. By telling Henri’s shameful story, he seems to be asking everyone watching what they would have done in his place back then. And, perhaps, now.

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Obama Relives Tan Suit Debacle In ‘Life, Larry & Pursuit of Unhappiness’

Published

22 minutes ago

August 9, 2026

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As Larry David‘s comedic trip through U.S. history comes to an end, he took credit for one of the nation’s more recent presidential scandals.

On Friday’s season finale of the HBO sketch comedy miniseries Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, President Barack Obama made a surprise appearance as himself in a sketch set in 2014, as David advised him to wear the now-infamous, outrage-inducing tan suit during his live press conference on military response to ISIS.

Following some banter on how the POTUS avoids stains, David accidentally spills juice on Obama’s suit jacket when he leaves the room. When the 44th president returns, the comedian recommends he wear the tan suit that Obama planned on taking it to Turin for NATO Summit, for “a daytime event, it’s outdoors, a little more casual.”

“First of all, it’s a gorgeous suit,” David declared. “And this is casual Friday!”

“It is a great suit,” admitted Obama, as David told him, “Oh boy, oh boy. I think this is the move. … Old lips won’t let you down. You’ll thank me!”

As Obama models the look, David gives him his signature, “Pretty good! Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.”

“You sure about this?” asks Obama, as David assures him, “Never been more sure about anything in my life. People are going to be talking about this for a long, long time.”

Obama’s cameo in the finale comes as David marks the United States Semiquencentennial with the seven-part sketch comedy limited series, which recounts major events in U.S. history through the comedian’s signature observational humor.

David’s longtime Curb Your Enthusiasm partner Jeff Schaffer, who serves as an executive producer on Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, previously told Deadline that Obama, who produced under his Higher Ground banner, reached out to his buddy David to ask if he’d be interested in making the show to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday.

“When you’re doing a show about American history, you want to do it warts and right now we have this orange saggy wart that we wish would go away,” said Schaffer. “But the nice thing about having President Obama produce this and be a part of it is that this country’s had a lot of fuck ups, we’ve seemed to have learned very little, but we’re still moving forward sometimes, and then we move back a little bit, but we always move forward again. While Larry’s pointing out a lot of the steps back, the President is telling us we can still step forward.”

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Matthew McConaughey Performs “Quill” From ‘Rivals of Amziah King’ — Watch

Published

1 hour ago

August 9, 2026

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Matthew McConaughey shows off his vocal skills (and some hidden banjo talents) with his latest role in The Rivals of Amziah King.

On Friday, Lakeshore Records released the single and music video for “Quill” from the original motion picture soundtrack, performed by the Oscar-winning and co-star Ben Hardesty, also featuring Miranda Zickler, Angelina LookingGlass and Andrea Pister.

Set in the backwoods of Oklahoma, The Rivals of Amziah King follows the musically gifted Amaziah King (McConaughey) and his bluegrass-playing band of misfits while overseeing the premier honey-making operation in town. When Amaziah’s estranged foster daughter unexpectedly returns, he leaps at the chance to reconnect and create a family business. But the honey game is ruthless, and Amaziah’s rivals threaten to destroy everything he has built.

Premiering Aug. 14 in theaters, the Andrew Patterson-written-and-directed drama also stars Angelina LookingGlass, Cole Sprouse, Jake Horowitz, Tony Revolori and Kurt Russell.

Producers are David Heyman, Teddy Schwarzman, Jeffrey Clifford, Michael Heimler, James Montague and Will Greenfield.

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Jane Schoenbrun On Tackling “Toxic Soup” Of Slasher Genre In ‘Camp Miasma’

Published

2 hours ago

August 9, 2026

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With their latest directorial outing, Jane Schoenbrun used subtle pieces of nostalgia to deconstruct the slasher genre.

The Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma writer/director explained to Deadline that they wanted to create “a mindset where you can really enjoy something scary,” noting the frequent symbolism of candy and junk food as providing an atmosphere “that’s actually safe” while diving into a horror movie or exploring sexuality after trauma.

“There is this idea that if it gets too real, you can turn it off, that you’re exploring something dangerous, doing it in a way that’s actually safe,” said Schoenbrun, who is non-binary. “Which in my experience of coming into my sexual identity post-transition, kind of required some gummy candy on hand. What I mean by that is, even if we’re going to be exploring scary and vulnerable and potentially embarrassing, triggering parts of ourselves, we trust each other well enough to know that at any moment, we can be like, ‘Let’s stop, we gotta just eat some fucking gummies.’”

In Schoenbrun’s latest film, Hannah Einbinder stars as queer director Kris, who is tapped to helm a new installment of the long-running Camp Miasma horror franchise. While courting Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played the “final girl” in the original film, to reprise her role, the pair spirals into a psychosexual frenzy as the slasher’s killer, Little Death (Jack Haven), comes to life.

Acknowledging the problematic trans representation of horror films like Psycho (1960), Sleepaway Camp (1983), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995), Schoenbrun admitted the genre has been “catnip to me since I was 10 years old,” and they jumped at the chance to direct their own.

Jane Schoenbrun at the — Jane Schoenbrun attends the ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ premiere on Aug. 5, 2026 in New York City.

“So many slashers do have this sense of humor, and even if they’re not overtly meta like the Scream movies are, they’re so aware of their own tropes and the sort of rituals … And I just loved that from a young age and loved all of the little rituals within it, and so, getting to make my own is just like play and joy,” they explained.

“But it also felt like the perfect way to talk about sex and to talk about my experience as a trans person post-transition, learning how to come into a sexual identity that I could feel comfortable within, because so many of these movies are obviously deeply engaged in gender and sexual roles, and these movies have so much to say for better or for worse about deviants,” said Schoenbrun. “It is there in the DNA of the slasher genre that these movies are talking about fear and desire, gender and sexuality, normativity and deviance. And that’s all swimming in the toxic soup of the genre, so I wanted to remake it in my own language.”

Read on about Jane Schoenbrun’s love letter to the slasher genre with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, now playing in theaters.

DEADLINE: It was really fun to see the slasher genre through your eyes. Tell me about finding inspiration in that genre and “final girls.”

JANE SCHOENBRUN: I mean, it was the easiest thing in the world because it’s just one of those genres that has been catnip to me since I was 10 years old. I just raided the horror section of the video store as a kid from an age when I really shouldn’t have been doing that, like in 5th grade, I watched in the span of about one week, every Nightmare on Elm Street movie. I think that I was always drawn to movies and really anything entertainment where it felt forbidden in some way, like the thing on the tape, how is that even allowed? And that’s the thing that I love about a lot of my favorite slashers. Don’t get me wrong, I love like brutal ones, like I love Texas Chainsaw, that’s a nasty movie at its core, and that’s what’s so special about it. But so many slashers do have this sense of humor, and even if they’re not overtly meta like the Scream movies are, they’re so aware of their own tropes and the sort of rituals of, OK, what’s the most outrageous way that like these like dumb kids can get killed? But watching it, it’s not about fear a lot of the time, it’s about joy and celebration. And I just loved that from a young age and loved all of the little rituals within it, and so, getting to make my own is just like play and joy. But it also felt like the perfect way to talk about sex and to talk about my experience as a trans person post-transition, learning how to come into a sexual identity that I could feel comfortable within, because so many of these movies are obviously deeply engaged in gender and sexual roles, and these movies have so much to say for better or for worse about deviants, whether that be Norman Bates or Buffalo Bill or Sleepway Camp or Jason, Michael Myers, Leatherface in drag. It is there in the DNA of the slasher genre that these movies are talking about fear and desire, gender and sexuality, normativity and deviance. And that’s all swimming in the toxic soup of the genre, so I wanted to remake it in my own language.

‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ (2026)

DEADLINE: I’m curious about the symbolism of all the processed junk food and the chandelier of wrappers.

SCHOENBRUN: The junk food in the movie, I forget when it found its way in there. It’s like so much of the movie is about, like I said, ritual, about being in a mindset where you can really enjoy something scary, whether that be Kris [Hannah Einbinder] in bed, with, you know, with Raisinets and the popcorn, watching a schlocky horror movie, or the two characters learning how to be present and enjoy sex after a lot of trauma. There is this idea that if it gets too real, you can turn it off, that you’re exploring something dangerous, doing it in a way that’s actually safe. Which in my experience of coming into my sexual identity post-transition, kind of required some gummy candy on hand. What I mean by that is, even if we’re going to be exploring scary and vulnerable and potentially embarrassing, triggering parts of ourselves, we trust each other well enough to know that at any moment, we can be like, “Let’s stop, we gotta just eat some fucking gummies.”

DEADLINE: And one thing I really love—I just feel like it’s a theme in your work—is how it depicts the way media and entertainment influence us. Why does that inspire you?

SCHOENBRUN: I think it comes from a fascination and sensitivity to the complex relationship between what we think of as fiction and what we think of as reality, which we tend to, as a society, think of as pointing in one direction. Like, reality dictates fiction, not vice-versa, but when you actually look at the way the world works, it’s like one echoes off the other. And I think a complicated, sometimes terrifying and sometimes beautiful way, where the fiction, the cultural norms, the things we grow up looking at on our screens, the roles that we’re told people play, they kind of inspire us to create reality. There’s something liberating when you start thinking in that way. I think it’s a way of thinking that we as a culture, could do a lot more of. To think about the idea of fiction inspiring reality just as much as reality is inspiring fiction, is a potential path to liberating us from this hellscape that they’re telling us is the only way the world can be.

Gillian Anderson in ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ (2026)

DEADLINE: And I know you have the Secretary reading. Tell me what it’s been like prepping for that and why you all chose that movie.

SCHOENBRUN: I mean, that was such a huge influence on on Miasma. There just aren’t that many fun and funny movies about deviant sex. And just the way that movie is like feather light while talking about really raw and taboo things, it is just really inspiring to me. And the dynamic between those two main characters is definitely one that had a lot of influence on on Kris and Billy’s [Gillian Anderson] relationship in Miasma. And it’s already to me a very queer movie in its way, but having Gillian reading the James Spader part and Hannah reading the Maggie Gyllenhaal part, I think it’s just gonna be like a very unique joy. Honestly, we’ve been prepping a little bit, but I think it’s just gonna be about getting up there and feeling the chemistry of it all, and just letting these folks who we have all gotten to know each other really, really well, but we haven’t actually done anything wacky and creative like that in a while, like as a reunion, it’s gonna be a real blast, I think.