Écran Large is back on the Croisette for the Cannes Film Festival 2026. And it’s time to revisit Notre salut, in which Swann Arlaud plays a collaborator under the Vichy regime.
Cannes 2026 reflects the unsettling resurgence of World War II-era themes in fiction. From Fatherland to Moulin and including Coward and La Bataille de Gaulle, European cinema is reconstructing a past that is quietly beginning to feel like history, just as the 21st century seems to be repeating the same mistakes.
It’s as timely as Notre salut, in which director Emmanuel Marre (Rien à foutre) tells the life of an opportunistic manager within the Vichy regime, based on the real-life story of his great-grandfather: Henri Marre.
Rays and Flashes
What’s it about? September 1940, the regime of Pétain takes hold. Henri Marre, 49, arrives in Vichy broke, with no connections, far from his wife and children. He sees in the new administration the opportunity to finally grab the place he believes is rightfully his, carrying in his suitcase his self-published political tract, Our Salvation, where he defends his patriotic beliefs and his engineer’s methods.
So, how’s it doing? “Didn’t General de Gaulle say that all of France had resisted?”, asked incredulously the OSS 117 character in Rio ne répond plus. In 2026, the same Jean Dujardin starred in Rayons et des ombres by Xavier Giannoli, making it hard not to compare Notre salut to that film. In the face of resistance acts in Moulin and La Bataille de Gaulle, French-language cinema isn’t shy about tackling collaboration, and in both cases it sidesteps a simple “bad guy / not bad guy” dichotomy to understand fascist trajectories.
It isn’t merely a retelling of his great-grandfather’s history; Emmanuel Marre doesn’t soften his ancestor. Introduced at a party where his voice takes time to truly be heard, Henri is a convinced Petainist, coupled with a mediocre climb-seeker. His only chance is to be organized, and to know how to bullsh** dossiers for consulting firms that will earn him a place at the Commissariat de la lutte contre le chômage.
Facing a bureaucracy made all the more chaotic by France’s split, Henri tries to introduce the notion of management, delivered through heavy-handed repressive laws and ill-fitting proposals for jobs, worker classification, and other humiliating policing-like strategies. In short, a proto-Macron before his time.
Emmanuel Marre is keen to show that this comparison isn’t exaggerated. Even though Henri holds clear beliefs and an admiration for the Marshal, his thinking aligns more with today’s center-right—accused of leaning toward the extremes. His attitude toward order and “good sense” in a capitalist mold ends up colliding with a hollow meritocracy, and he remains a perpetual second—both in the hierarchy and in the photos taken with his leaders—yet keeps feeding the machine through ever larger moral compromises.
This shift is driven by the film’s chilling handling of what happens off screen. Marre links to contemporary realities through a formal approach that leans into the documentary-tinged, raw style of Rien à foutre, where a burst of flash stays glued to the camera. It feels like a set of Polaroids coming to life, fleeting life fragments whose ellipses and variety of situations create a more intricate portrait of Henri, buoyed by Swann Arlaud’s remarkably restrained performance.
In the opening act, the family he left behind stays outside the frame—a mirror of selfishness and a blind spot hammered out through letters exchanged almost mechanically. Yet the emphasis on words and their weight matters, because compromises often hinge on semantics. The supposed “round-up” of Jews becomes a “gathering,” while Henri’s blinders finally detach enough to reveal the full horror of Vichy collaboration, which will be addressed only once that moment arrives.
Whereas the protagonist of Fatherland, a renowned German writer, hopes his writings and ideas can help rebuild both Germanys after the war, he faces the impotence of his own words—an instrumented varnish, at best. Perhaps, like Jean Moulin, one must learn to stay silent for a moment, only to find oneself hollowed out by the use of a managerial brand of speech whose only real power is to euphemize horror.
And when does it come out? On September 30 via Condor.
