With Notre Salut, Emmanuel Marre films the human periphery of Europe through a physical and emotional intimacy that transforms desire, precarity and migration into a profoundly contemporary experience.
At Cannes, some films arrive accompanied by established names, major budgets or campaigns designed to dominate headlines. Others emerge quietly within the programme and gradually grow throughout the festival like a persistent rumour among critics, programmers and audiences who feel they have discovered something strange and deeply alive. Notre Salut, by Belgian director Emmanuel Marre, clearly belonged to the latter category.
Presented in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, the film confirmed something that part of contemporary European independent cinema has been exploring for years: that the continent’s most urgent stories do not always unfold within its centres of power, but along its invisible margins. In petrol stations. In temporary apartments. On nighttime roads. Inside bodies crossing physical and emotional borders while simply trying to find somewhere to rest.
And that is precisely what Emmanuel Marre films.
Notre Salut follows Victoire and Smaïl, two young migrants surviving in peripheral Belgium through precarious jobs, petty crime and emotional bonds built more from mutual necessity than from any idealised notion of romance. The film deliberately avoids the classic sociological approach to migration or social exclusion. Marre does not want to explain his characters. He wants to remain beside them. To breathe with them. To observe how their bodies occupy spaces where they constantly seem tolerated but never fully accepted.
And that decision completely transforms the experience of the film.
Because Notre Salut never feels like conventional social-issue cinema. The film operates from somewhere more physical, more intimate and profoundly more uncomfortable: the permanent sensation of emotional displacement. Victoire and Smaïl are not filmed as political symbols or exemplary victims. They are young people attempting to survive emotionally inside a world where almost everything seems designed to render them invisible.
Visually, Marre constructs a nocturnal and damp universe where precarity appears neither aestheticised nor miserabilist. The cinematography works through dim urban lighting, cramped interiors and peripheral roads permeated by a constant feeling of transit. Belgium emerges here less as a country than as an emotional territory suspended between economic exhaustion and the impossibility of fully belonging anywhere.
There is something particularly European about that atmosphere.
A Europe far removed from institutional rhetoric and tourist imagery. A Europe where multicultural coexistence is no longer perceived as an idealistic promise but as a fragile and silent coexistence between people exhausted by economic systems incapable of offering emotional or material stability. Marre observes all of this without obvious ideological emphasis. He prefers to work through minimal gestures: a shared cigarette, an interrupted conversation, a nighttime car ride where two characters seem too tired even to speak.
And it is precisely there that the film discovers its real power.
Because Notre Salut understands that much contemporary violence no longer needs to express itself explicitly. It lives inside permanent precarity. Temporary jobs. Migration bureaucracy. The sensation that certain bodies permanently occupy provisional spaces within European society.
At Cannes, many post-screening conversations revolved around precisely that sensibility. Some critics compared Marre’s cinema to that of the Dardenne brothers, particularly in the way he films bodies moving through industrial and urban landscapes. But Notre Salut possesses a different texture. More sensual. More erratic. Less structured around moral guilt and more interested in observing how people search for small moments of pleasure or intimacy even within deeply precarious circumstances.
The relationship between Victoire and Smaïl operates according to that logic.
There are no grand romantic declarations or traditional emotional arcs. What exists instead is a mutual need for companionship against the exhaustion of everyday life. Marre films affection as something fragile, almost accidental, constructed through small improvised acts of care. And precisely for that reason, the intimate scenes possess an emotional truth difficult to find in much contemporary social cinema.
There is also something profoundly contemporary in the way the film observes desire.
The characters relate physically like people fully aware of the permanent instability of their lives. Everything feels provisional. Even happiness. Marre avoids easy sentimentality and yet still manages to make the audience constantly feel how desperately these characters need to be seen by someone, even if only for a few moments.
The camera remains extremely close to them. At times too close. As if the film wanted to eliminate any comfortable distance between viewer and character. That proximity generates moments of enormous emotional vulnerability, particularly in scenes where silence occupies more space than dialogue.
On the Croisette, where films are often rapidly categorised as “political cinema,” “auteur cinema” or “social cinema,” Notre Salut proved more difficult to classify. And perhaps that is part of its strength. Marre seems less interested in constructing discourse than in capturing contemporary emotional states: exhaustion, desire, precarity, fear of the future, the desperate need for human contact.
All of this moves constantly through the film.
Even the spaces possess a particular emotional dimension. Petrol stations open after midnight. Temporary rooms. Empty parking lots. Half-empty bars where nobody seems to stay very long. Marre films a nocturnal Europe where people exist in permanent transit, as if stability itself had become an inaccessible privilege for much of an entire generation.
And yet, Notre Salut never collapses into nihilism.
Because even within that emotional and economic precarity, the film discovers small moments of radical tenderness. A gaze held for slightly too long. One body resting beside another. The minimal — but still existing — possibility that someone might accompany another person through the night.
Perhaps that is why the film continued resonating quietly throughout Cannes long after the first reviews appeared. Not as a work designed to impose grand theses about Europe or migration, but as an intimate experience about people trying to preserve some degree of humanity inside increasingly dehumanising structures.
And ultimately, that transforms Notre Salut into something more painful than a simple social drama.
Because Emmanuel Marre seems to understand that the true contemporary tragedy is not merely exclusion.
It is slowly becoming accustomed to living as though one is always passing through.