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.
A Good Little Soldier
The Bottom Line
Gripping and well-performed, if rather didactic.
