On Wednesday in competition, “Notre salut” by Emmanuel Marre is the second film this year after “Les Rayons et les ombres,” released in March, telling the story of the war from the collaborationist perspective.
There are no war scenes or heroic resistance fighters in this feature film, which portrays a Vichy regime official installed in Limoges, an ordinary cog in a monstrous machine.
Emmanuel Marre actually tells the story of his great-grandfather Henri Marre (played by Swann Arlaud), author of a lofty book on managerial thinking and patriotism entitled “Notre salut,” which he tried to promote during the Vichy period. To feed the narrative, he relied on the correspondence between his great-grandfather and his wife.
“As I read these letters (…) I thought to myself ‘wouldn’t it be interesting to tell the story of someone in the background?'” explains Emmanuel Marre to AFP.
Rather than focusing on the most spectacular figures of collaboration – those “great collaborators” portrayed by Jean Luchaire in “Les Rayons et les ombres,” a newspaper publisher executed at the Liberation – the director chooses to focus on an ordinary functionary, one of the thousands of anonymous individuals who continued to work under Vichy.
– Painful memory –
Emmanuel Marre recalls a history class in college where the teacher asked us ‘do any of you have grandparents who were resistance fighters?’. The vast majority raised their hands.
“I thought something was wrong,” he recalls. “Why does everyone need to say they were part of the resistance? Resistance, heroism is not within everyone’s reach.” The vast majority of people at the time did nothing because they were unaware of the extent of the crimes committed, insists the filmmaker.
The film, set to be released on September 30, could rekindle the debate on the memory of the collaboration, following “Les Rayons et les ombres” released in March, which some, especially on the left, criticized for being lenient with the figure of Jean Luchaire.
The representation of collaboration in cinema “is obviously much more contentious than that of the Resistance,” explains historian Sylvie Lindeperg.
“The Vichy syndrome (historical term referring to the difficulty of facing a shameful past) has persisted for a long time,” notes historian and director Christian Delage.
However, he confirms the renewed interest of cinema in World War II. “War is at our doorstep. It’s the end of what was the post-war peace project,” and filmmakers are questioning the origins of the threatened international order today, he continues.
– Not courageous –
Emmanuel Marre’s film is the only one at Cannes to adopt a radical viewpoint, showing “human beings who are not necessarily courageous” during the war, according to the director.
Another war film, presented outside of competition on Wednesday, is the first part of the biopic on General De Gaulle, a big-budget production in the classic style depicting the life of the leader of Free France during the five years of war.
“Moulin,” about the final days of the Resistance leader, is a reminder of the “price to pay for freedom,” according to its director Laszlo Nemes. Finally, Daniel Auteuil recounts the story of a Vichy official who saved Jews in “La troisième nuit,” presented at Cannes Première.
“With ‘Notre salut,’ we’re not trying to allocate good and bad points, to say here are the villains, here are the good guys,” Swann Arlaud asserts.
The film is an invitation to look at “how political movements can play on our intimate neuroses and make us tip (…) by coming to tease our failures, our resentments,” explains Emmanuel Marre.
Source: AFP
