A Good Little Soldier (Un bon petit soldat) | 2026 Venice Film Festival Review

A HR Manager Never Cries: Brize Takes on Executive Hypocrisy

When he’s not exploring intimate relationship melodramas, French director Stéphane Brizé has been one of the most prominent contemporary voices exploring toxic workplace scenarios of late stage capitalism and the despairing occupational realities somehow normalized as commonplace. Usually, he’s dealing with dramatic, life changing tragedies, often led by his frequent collaborator Vincent Lindon (who won Best Actor at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival for The Measure of a Man). Brizé returns to the executive realm he previously dipped his feet into with 2021’s Another World (also focused on Lindon), but this time focuses on a female lead in A Good Little Soldier, reuniting him with Alba Rohrwacher (star of his lovely and masterful 2023 romantic drama Out of Season).

A rock cover of “What a Wonderful World” plays over a bustling city as forty-three-year-old Carla Moretti (Rohrwacher) makes her way to work, recently hired as the Human Resources manager for a large insurance company called Amali. As it turns out, Amali is not such a wonderful world, after all. But it wants to pretend that it is. Carla’s first meeting finds the CEO (Lindon) raging about the political correct messaging in a commercial for a new campaign intended to appeal to young talents desiring to work for them. The intention of this marketing was to showcase how Amali is basically open to employing people with disabilities, but the CEO declares their business is not about charity, forcing Carla to find another approach. Meanwhile, she shares custody of her young son whose father is concerned Carla is applying too much pressure on him to succeed, and her new position means spending less quality time on family matters. When a retiring employee shares with Carla an audio message of a department manager brutally berating an underperforming employee, she approaches her cohorts for advice. Sanctioning the erring manager might directly affect the profit margin of that department.

A Good Little Soldier is much lighter fare than one might expect from Brizé’s usual methods in charting the crushing realities of corporate servitude. While he never steers into heavily concentrated miserabilism, his vocational portraits are usually somber affairs, reflecting an element of indentured servitude for working class occupations, perhaps never more virulent than in 2018’s At War. His focus is usually those who are stuck between whoever’s in charge and the bottom rung, the middle manager who has a semblance of power but is the first to take the blame from both sides. They are akin to the governesses, professors, or brothel madams of a past era’s social structures, occupying a rigid, specific lane demanding their subservience to a system also devouring them, just less slowly than their subordinates.

This set-up contains a lot of levity, perhaps because this is a wavelength Rohrwacher already seems to occupy naturally. We believe she has the best intentions of being fair, professional, and eager to make a difference. She’s not naive, but she represents how authenticity and accountability are eventually condensed to the merest wisps of lip service. As the demeaning edge of the title indicates, Carla is a victim of her circumstances, her emotional strengths treated like a vulnerability. But she is also one of Brizé’s most inviting characterizations precisely because of this. If anything, A Good Little Soldier suggests the necessary alternative to navigating a workplace volleying between the insincerity often lurking behind political correctness and the inherent disrespect of unfiltered, emotional reactions. An agreed upon code of conduct must be obeyed, but constructive critiques and genuine feedback should not be subjugated for the appeasement of someone’s ego. But then, the real issue isn’t actually squabbling about doing the right thing, it’s navigating whatever the current cultural climate decides is appropriate while always maintaining bottom life profit, no matter what. Crew expendable.

Carla’s genuine reactions are what make A Good Little Soldier so relatable because of the inherent code switching that occurs between the different realms most of us traverse. Her personal life is suffering because she’s neglecting her child and bringing the resentment she can’t express at work to her personal life. In the film’s most agonizing scene, her rather milquetoast but kindly ex-husband reveals some hard truths about how their son believes his mom thinks he’s a loser. She has a frustrated meltdown about his ineptitude in mathematics which is funny but heartbreaking at the same time. Her reaction is understandable (for anyone who’s ever had to parent and/or teach anyone about anything they’re clearly disinterested in) but it’s immediately apparent her blowing off steam will create a moment her son will never forget, and it causes a ripple effect in behavior patterns.

And in one of the film’s funniest scenes, Carla discreetly turns down the volume on a Zoom call with her friend living in New York, whose daughter wants to share a singing performance from a contest she’d recently attended. The irony Brizé’s outlining is how we can innately absorb the energy of emotions we repress, but they find a way out when we feel safe to unleash them on those who cannot fight back or have any real equanimity with us. It’s really all so simple, and yet, we all somehow, have engaged in these exact same kinds of behaviors. While Clara’s story might be left up in the air, the lighter side of Brizé is just as pregnant with intention, a reminder to not just mind the gaps, but take a look at the shifting angles and perspectives that widen them around us (which is likely why we see so many shots glancing between towering office buildings). Sometimes, the ‘gap’ might represent getting over the fear or discomfort which will bring us personal growth. And sometimes, taking a chance and failing to breach that gap might mean finally learning a difficult lesson about the necessity of changing course. Either way, it’s about learning to deduce if the situation is also serving you. One hopes Carla Morreti eventually gets to a place where she can tell these raggedy insurance salesmen to fuck off.

Reviewed on September 9th at the 2026 Venice Film Festival (83rd edition) – In Competition. 102 Minutes.

★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆