Swann Arlaud delivers a gripping performance in Notre Salut, Emmanuel Marre’s quietly unsettling portrait of life under the Vichy regime in Nazi-occupied France. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival 2025, the film follows Henri Marre, the director’s own great-grandfather, a minor official at the Vichy ministry of labour who schemes his way through the occupation with cowardly brilliance.
Arlaud plays Henri as a toxic cocktail of arrogance, intellectual posturing, and survival instinct, a man who believes in nothing except keeping himself alive. The film pulls no punches about who this man really was.
Writer-director Emmanuel Marre builds a slow-burn, detail-heavy drama that feels almost novelistic, mixing conventional cinematography with jarring dreamlike video sequences. Cannes 2025 already has another Nazi occupation film in competition, László Nemes’s Moulin, but Notre Salut is the sharper, more unsettling of the two.
This one gets under your skin and stays there.
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