Cannes Film Festival 2026: A Man of His Time and The Man I Love

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On this eighth day of the competition, the 2026 Cannes Film Festival presented Emmanuel Marre’s A Man of His Time (Notre Salut) and Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love.

The Man I Love : The Festival has entered the final stretch toward the awards ceremony with the screening of A Man of His Time (Notre Salut), the second feature film from Belgian director Emmanuel Marre following his 2021 work Zero Fucks Given (Rien à Foutre). This marks his first selection in the Official Competition, with a story inspired by his own great-grandfather, who served as a civil servant in Vichy. Seven years after Frankie, which competed in 2019 and starred Isabelle Huppert, American director Ira Sachs returns to the Competition with a kind of musical: The Man I Love.

A Man of His Time ©DR

Emmanuel Marre’s A Man of His Time

A Man of His Time is emerging at Cannes as one of the most unsettling French entries of the 2026 edition. Following Zero Fucks Given, Belgian director Emmanuel Marre abandons contemporary naturalism to plunge into the gray zones of Vichy France. Inspired by his own family history, the film follows Henri, a lackluster civil servant who arrives in Vichy in September 1940 with the hope of rebuilding an existence shattered by personal failure. In his suitcase, he carries a self-published political treatise titled Notre Salut – a technocratic manifesto in which he dreams of rebuilding France “through efficiency.” But behind the administrative ambition lies a chilling portrait of an ordinary man caught in the machinery of collaboration. Far from spectacular historical epics, Marre chooses narrow corridors, dusty offices, and bureaucratic micro-decisions to tell the story of how a regime is established almost banally, file by file, form by form.

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Ordinary Little Cowardices

Driven by an impressive performance from Swann Arlaud – who embodies both ridicule and moral fragility without ever seeking to excuse his character – the film is disturbing precisely because it refuses the comfort of immediate judgment. Opposite him, Sandrine Blancke portrays a wife who gradually observes her husband’s moral collapse with growing lucidity. Filmed in the actual administrative locations in Vichy, A Man of His Time cultivates an almost suffocating documentary proximity, fueled by authentic letters exchanged between the filmmaker’s own great-grandparents. Emmanuel Marre films administrative grotesquerie with a biting irony – employees obsessed with fuel allowances or bureaucrats ensuring that people shout “Long live the Marshal” loudly enough – until the moment the laughter freezes brutally. On the Croisette, many already view A Man of His Time as a major political work: a film that reminds us that history rarely turns on a thunderous crash, but often within the quiet comfort of ordinary little cowardices.

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Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love

In Official Competition, The Man I Love brings an emotion to the Croisette that is both flamboyant and crepuscular. Seven years after Frankie, American filmmaker Ira Sachs returns to Cannes with a deeply intimate work, led by Rami Malek in the role of Jimmy George, a magnetic figure of the New York theatrical scene in the late 1980s. While AIDS ravages his body and his entourage, Jimmy refuses to disappear into tragedy alone. Instead, Sachs films a man who still wants to love, create, dance, and desire with an almost insolent intensity. In a feverish, nocturnal New York, filled with music, rehearsals, and stage lights, The Man I Love transforms a predicted end into a final celebration of the living. The director himself cites the influence of Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh: a narrative of death that paradoxically overflows with energy, sensuality, and movement.

The Man I Love ©DR

Sensual Delicacy

Behind this melancholic elegance lies a devastating film-memoir. Ira Sachs and his co-screenwriter, Maurício Zacharias, draw directly from their own memories of their New York years, when HIV was taking away artists, actors, and friends amid an often-chilling indifference. Refusing any museum-like reenactment, the filmmaker prefers to capture the fragments of joy that survived despite everything: the nights of partying, the improvised rehearsals, the fleeting loves, and the sense of urgency that defined an entire generation. On the Croisette, The Man I Love impresses as much with its sensual delicacy as with its implicit political gaze on an era abandoned by public authorities. Through Jimmy George, Ira Sachs has crafted less of a drama about illness than a vibrant ode to those who continued to love and create in the face of collapse. It is a film where every song, every embrace, and every silence seems to already belong to the memory of cinema.