Marre's 'A Man of His Time' Earns Mixed Marks at NYFF

Emmanuel Marre's A Man of His Time screened at the 64th New York Film Festival. Distribution goes to 1-2 Special. The Belgian filmmaker directs. The runtime stretches to nearly three hours. Swann Arlaud, the French actor, plays Henri Marre.

It pieces together a portrait from documents, silences, and one quiet man's slow ascent through a collaborationist regime's clerical machinery that left few fingerprints on history.

What is the film actually about?

The protagonist is a Vichy functionary loosely modeled on Marre's own great-grandfather. He worms his way into a minor post under Marshal Philippe Pétain. He pitches a treatise on Pétain's importance to ministers who don't want it. He climbs by sanding down every moral edge until the climb itself becomes invisible.

In one colder sequence, Henri penalizes a subordinate for buying toiletries for Jews bound for the camps. He doesn't disagree with the gesture. He sympathizes with Jews. He doesn't want to punish his colleague. It's the way things are. The system must move forward.

What does the review say?

A Film Stage review called it "a worthwhile attempt at political analysis whose interest is not in appeasing us, but making us actively think through how we engage with our social environment." The same piece warned that the film "fails to make a lasting impression before simply disappearing into the maw of historical memory." The criticism lands on flatness. The nearly three-hour runtime offers little tonal variation.

How does Marre shoot it?

Handheld, almost entirely. The camera drifts through party scenes like a documentary crew, eavesdropping rather than staging. The opening finds Henri as one unimportant background player in a sea of socialites. The lens catches snippets of conversation after conversation with no clear focus beyond ambient noise.

Henri emerges mid-frame, then vanishes. He lingers at edges of debates about France's future. Nobody quite notices him.

The aesthetic recalls Peter Watkins' docu-fiction experiments (a British director who pioneered staged-but-uncued political simulations). Music from the 1980s slices in during a dance and a career montage, and that small anachronism sits against Vichy France and our recent past at once.

Where does it falter?

The pace stays flat across the full runtime. No tonal shift arrives. The Film Stage review put it bluntly: "little variation in tone or rhythm across a nearly three-hour runtime." Marre's main weakness, by that account, lies in his refusal to modulate.

The banality of evil — thoughtless participation in atrocity — remains Marre's throughline. He treats monotony itself as a synecdoche (a literary device where a part stands in for the whole) for fascism's numbing ordinariness. The trick lands as atmosphere. It thins as argument.

What does this mean going forward?

A Man of His Time enters an American market still absorbing The Zone of Interest and still replaying Jojo Rabbit as comfort viewing. Marre offers neither catharsis nor satire. He hands audiences something slower, rarer, and harder to recommend at a Thursday-evening screening. That's the bind 1-2 Special now faces.