An administrator inside the machine

Its central figure embraces the bureaucracy and logistics of sending people to their deaths. The award-winning drama looks not to well-known heroes or monsters but to the everyday people who took part in the puppet Vichy regime that collaborated with the Nazis.

• •It departs from standard second world war costume drama with modern lighting, improvised scenes and an anachronistic 1980s Europop soundtrack.
• •The Vichy regime's collaboration ensured the deportation of a quarter of France's Jewish population to concentration camps.
• •Under Marshal Philippe Pétain, the regime collaborated in the deportation of 76,000 Jewish people to Nazi concentration camps.

The subject is finding a public: the film is drawing audiences into French cinemas, and this week's opening proved strongest among young viewers.

Family letters that sat in a drawer

Writer-director Emmanuel Marre, who won the best Screenplay prize at the Cannes film festival, began working on the story more than a decade ago. His material was a stash of family letters giving insight into his great-grandfather Henri Marre, who worked as an administrator under the authoritarian puppet regime - papers his family had kept in a drawer.

Marre told France Inter that after the war France pushed much of the collaboration under the carpet to survive. Similar drawers exist everywhere in France, he explained, and behind them a phantom memory of the collaboration. The film wanted, he said, to prise those drawers open so all families could face that history, not as flagellation. The nuance of what led people to collaborate or take a stand was crucial to examine, he argued: a range of human emotions lies between resistance and collaboration.

A historian's warning about the second players

Marc Olivier Baruch, a specialist on the state administrators of the Vichy regime, said there are great figures who make history, but history is also made by the second-players and grassroots actors on the ground. For him, the film's most chilling scene shows bureaucrats nitpicking over the costs of providing Jews on cattle trucks with straw and chamber pots. Its central administrator, he said, never stops to consider what he is doing or what room for manoeuvre he might have.

The film's unease, Baruch said, speaks to audiences because France is in a time of great uncertainty, with a long-running lack of confidence in elites and in the state. The Pétain dictatorship, he noted, was the only moment the far right was in power since 1820 - a chapter that interests French people in 2026 and 2027. Modern France, he added, has felt it would be better to stop talking about Vichy and draw a line under it, an attitude he called stupid and impossible.

A wartime film wave meets a shifting election race

Notre Salut arrives amid a boom in films about France during the second world war. The two-part biopic of Charles de Gaulle has sold more than 5m tickets, and the wave also takes in the controversial Les Rayons et les Ombres, about the press baron and Nazi collaborator Jean Luchaire, and the forthcoming Moulin, about the last days of the resistance leader Jean Moulin. Film critics suggested modern audiences were seeking to better understand the rise of the far right across Europe and in France.

• •Marine Le Pen of the far-right, anti-immigration National Rally (RN) continues to top the polls for the presidential race.
• •Her lead has survived the fallout from a Mediapart investigation alleging that RN party leader Jordan Bardella published antisemitic comments as a young party member, which he denies.

Henry Rousso, a historian who has studied the Vichy regime's place in collective memory, wrote in Le Monde that the RN is neither the fascism of the 1930s nor a resurgence of the Pétain regime. Knowing this history, he wrote, shows what the RN is heir to - and how the mechanisms of gradually renouncing democratic and republican values led to disaster.

A Man of His Time is now tipped to become a box office hit as the presidential race - in which Marine Le Pen continues to top the polls - runs toward next spring's vote.