‘A Good Little Soldier’ Review: Stéphane Brizé’s Corporate Drama

French director Stéphane Brizé continues his full-throttled assault on corporate greed and unbridled capitalism in A Good Little Soldier (Un bon petit soldat), the latest in a series of tightly wound dramas about characters trapped in the pressure cooker of the modern-day workplace, losing a major part of themselves as they fight to keep their jobs.

Whereas previous movies concentrated on struggling blue-collar laborers (The Measure of a Man, At War) or a tormented factory boss (Another World) — all of them played by Vincent Lindon, who’s become the director’s muse — Brizé’s latest is about a woman swimming in the turbulent waters of middle management, trying to both appease her superiors and deal with problematic employees who can’t seem to get along.

If the somewhat sardonic tone of A Good Little Soldier, as well as its focus on a female protagonist struggling to maintain her place in the hierarchy while also being a good mom, is something of a departure for the French auteur, this is very much a Brizé movie through and through. In other words, the film is tense, realistic and compellingly performed — Alba Rohrwacher, who plays the lead, is as good as she’s ever been — but also a bit schematic and didactic, hammering home a familiar message about people crushed by the weight of shareholder value until there’s barely any life left in them.

Brizé definitely knows where his loyalties lie (with the working man or woman) and who his enemies are (CEOs and boards of directors), which he makes clear in an opening scene that has recently promoted HR manager Carla (Rohrwacher) attending an executive meeting spearheaded by Arnaud (Lindon, playing a bad guy for once), the cantankerous president of the French insurance conglomerate she works for. The meeting involves a glossy new promotional video meant to attract top-notch talent, but its focus on disabled employees drives Arnaud into a politically incorrect frenzy. “It freaks me out!” he shouts at the minions sitting around the conference table, bludgeoning them all into agreement.

Corporate communication — the image a company presents to the world versus what that same company actually does to the world — is a recurring theme in A Good Little Soldier, one of whose subplots involves the creation of a new promo video in which both Carla and Arnaud become participants. (An actual corporate video company was used to create those reels.) Brizé milks the tragicomic film shoot between the big boss and his underling for light laughs, as he does other moments emphasizing how far the firm is willing to go to brighten its image — including bringing in a “happiness manager” (Sharif Andoura) to lead a series of team-building exercises that transform the office into a kindergarten class.

Things are much, much darker beneath the surface, particularly for Carla, who juggles an impossible schedule and busload of responsibilities with her attempts to take care of her pre-teen son, Louis (Adrien Bobinet), whom she only ever gets to see via Facetime sessions from her desk or while in transit. The boy mostly lives with his dad (David Talbot), a well-meaning if milquetoast Frenchman whom the Italian-born Carla is separated from.

Whether at the office or at home, which is generally the office as well, Carla’s life seems so miserable that you start wondering what’s driven her to this point of madness. Brizé never really answers that question, presenting her as a self-motivated, extremely hardworking corporate hamster running on a wheel that turns faster and faster, threatening to toss her off the minute she stops churning or makes a false move. When a debacle involving two female employees, one of whom has been seriously harassing the other, risks exploding in Carla’s face, she tries to cover things up but only makes matters worse for herself in the process.

The irony of her situation — she’s responsible for human resources, which in reality means exploiting humans as much as possible (this includes herself as well) — is as blunt as the film’s title, which underlines how Carla is a willing cog in a machine that chews people up and spits them out the minute they lose value for shareholders. It’s also as ironically blunt as the use of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” which we hear in one of the infantilizing “happiness” sessions as well as during the opening credits sequence (in a cover by The Ramones), filled with images of sheep-like office workers commuting by métro and arriving at Paris’ monotone steel-and-glass La Défense business district.

The darkly comic tone of those scenes can feel borderline condescending — Did Brizé ever imagine that some people could perhaps find fulfillment in their office jobs? — but the film is also smart and compassionate enough to never feel too patronizing, especially in its portrayal of Carla. Rohrwacher, who already shined in the director’s 2023 seaside romance Out of Season, brings plenty of soul to a character striving within a crushing system, trying to do the right thing but also stay afloat in a cutthroat corporation.

The two goals seem incompatible, and that’s very much the point of Brizé’s latest exposé, which posits that late-stage capitalism is forever at odds with what makes us human. Only at the very end, once Carla has been through the wringer several times, does she realize there are things to be valued above her company’s stock price — although the movie leaves us with the impression that she doesn’t yet know how to apply that lesson to her own life. Still, the late scene in which everything finally hits Carla at once, forcing her to reconcile with who she’s become as both a manager and a mother, is a keeper.