After a brief detour back into romance, French director Stéphane Brizé returns to the genre where he’s found most success and acclaim: the social drama. A Good Little Soldier is the filmmaker’s fourth work about life under late capitalism in the Fifth Republic, but Brizé shows no signs of diminishing returns inside his comfort zone. Few of his peers anywhere around the globe balance intimate human drama and trenchant social commentary so nimbly.
After exploring contemporary business through the lens of Vincent Lindon playing an average blue-collar worker, a labor organizer, and a member of the managerial class, Brizé pivots to center a female perspective through Alba Rohrwacher’s Carla Moretti. This HR executive at the French insurance giant Amali is the film’s titular rank-and-file officer, complete with a cheeky rum-pa-pum drum score emphasizing just how easily she falls in line.
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Lindon is still present, naturally, as a plainspoken CEO overseeing Carla’s first major assignment in her new role. The company’s recruitment video for top business school graduates needs a refresh, and the latest iteration spotlighting DEI initiatives like disability accommodation misses the mark for him. As employees around a big table struggle to keep up with shifting imperatives, the meeting begins to play like a pitch-black parody of the hollowness inherent to corporate virtue signaling.
The change in direction proves deadly serious for Carla, however, who’s tasked with spearheading this corporate branding initiative while also maintaining the wholesome culture Amali wants to sell to prospective hires. A Good Little Soldier finds the beleaguered water-carrier in the battle of her life just to keep her own head above water. The restless gaze of Brizé’s observant camera captures Carla using her devices to keep tabs on this voluminous workload during transit (where she commits the cardinal sin of using her laptop on a crowded train).
As is so often the case when professional obligations bleed into personal domestic spaces, everything in Carla’s life begins to feel like work. That includes Louis, the teenage son she co-parents with her ex-husband. When stress mounts, Carla begins to manage her own child like an underperforming employee who needs to be held accountable for falling short on KPIs.
In a perverse stroke of genius by Brizé, Louis only appears through video calls. A Good Little Soldier reflects the reality and the appearance of an office culture ruled by the mediation of screens. These allow Carla to stay connected to countless projects and colleagues regardless of geography, sure. But as countless shots emphasize by framing her alone as she yells into a device, she’s really just an isolated figure talking to herself.
A Good Little Soldier both indulges Carla’s anxieties by making the stakes of a simple work project seem like a hair-raising thriller and puts them in proper perspective. What starts like a mordant corporate satire slowly slips into outright absurdism as words become disconnected from meaning altogether. She learns the importance of semantics the hard way when one of her “happiness workshops” surfaces a simmering departmental dispute that comes to subsume her time.
Try as she might to navigate helping people and maintaining performance, such clever maneuvering gets her nowhere. While blindly marching in lockstep, Carla has missed the directive that the new economy has given up on virtue altogether. It’s all-in on competitiveness now. As Carla’s blank stare registers this shift in the final shot, Brizé makes his thoughts clear through a swelling needle-drop that ushers in the closing credits: Moderat’s “A New Error.”