There’s not a single moment in Stéphane Brizé’s lukewarm workplace drama “A Good Little Soldier” where Alba Rohrwacher’s Carla Moretti isn’t at work — or on her way to the office, or at a coffee shop around the corner where she could scurry right back. Bowing in Venice’s main competition, and Brizé’s fourth time on the Lido, the film in many ways challenges the clichés we have about labor and the French, with their seemingly infinite congés and tendency to stop-drop-and-protest at the first sign of abuse. As the title suggests, Carla doesn’t just endure her job’s outsized demands on her time, energy, and soul, but is a workhorse by choice: a person willingly stripped of personality and independence like the sleek commercial everyplace (in fact, Paris’s anachronistically modern 13th arrondissement) where the story unfolds. Unfortunately, the film, too, could use a bit of punch to lift it out of the humdrum anti-corporate critique it takes for granted to be novel.
Essentially just a character study about the drone mindset, albeit one given decent texture by Rohrwacher’s performance, the film follows Carla in the first weeks of her new job as the human resources manager at a health insurance firm led by swaggering CEO Arnaud (a devilish Vincent Lindon, in his sixth film with Brizé). In a nervy boardroom sequence early on, Carla and her fellow executives present Arnaud with a glossy corporate video meant to attract a new generation of suits with inclusive messaging and feelgood images of able-bodied employees working alongside disabled ones.
