A Man of His Time

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.

Emmanuel Marre’s A Man of His Time uncovers the banality of evil at the very heart of the Vichy government, among the morally-lacking under-secretaries of Marshal Pétain’s cabinet.

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.

Marre’s position as the most anti- of anti-heroes initially feels like it’s going to generate fresh insight (not to mention contemporary prescience) on the era, yet the film can only restate the basics on one of the most mythologized periods in French history.

A Man of His Time is a pretty standard bio-pic that is elevated by Arlaud’s excellent, subtle performance as the director’s past relative.

This dramatic, grandiose treatment ultimately feels forced, ill-suited to a character who, despite the director and star’s joint efforts to mystify him, never ceases to come across as ordinarily mediocre.

A Man of His Time never justifies its subject or its methods, even if one wishes to make an argument for it being another embodiment of Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil.’