Our salvation: one of the cinema highlights of the year (review)

Inspired by the fate of his great-grandfather, Emmanuel Marre recounts the compromises of a collabo civil servant during the Vichy regime. As amazing in form as in substance, without forgetting to be funny.

In a Cannes festival where the question of the Occupation agitated a significant number of films in the selection (Moulin, La Bataille de Gaulle, La Troisième nuit…), Our Salvation stood out for its insolent modernity. Surely guided by its small budget and a big desire for experimentation, the second feature filmEmmanuel Marreafter the already astonishing Nothing to Fuck in 2022, is happy to desert the roads all mapped out around the great French taboo of collaboration.

The filmmaker is inspired by the life of his great-grandfather and places the action in 1940: Henri Marre (Swann Arlaudimmense), convinced Pétainist having lost his bourgeois way of life, joined the administration of the Vichy regime as responsible for the fight against unemployment.