A Good Little Soldier

 Oppression, beyond a certain degree of intensity, does not produce revolt but, on the contrary, an almost irresistible tendency towards complete submission.
— Simone Weil 

Stéphane Brizé returns to the territory where his cinema has found one of its most fertile obsessions: work as the place in which the individual discovers, often too late, his or her own subordination. After La Loi du marché, En guerre and Un autre monde, the French director continues to interrogate that apparently neutral apparatus called the corporation, behind which one of the most sophisticated forms of contemporary power is concealed. No longer merely the worker, the dismissed employee, the unionist or the executive forced to carry out orders with which they disagree: this time Brizé brings his camera inside Human Resources, precisely the place where contemporary capitalism has learned to transform domination into the language of care. And it is significant that the film begins with a lie. 

A corporate video is supposed to celebrate the image of a modern, inclusive, transversal company, capable of welcoming people with disabilities as well. It is the reassuring face of contemporary society: no one excluded, everyone valued, diversity transformed into an element of corporate identity. But as the room applauds this edifying representation, the CEO expresses his dissent, concerned about the effect those images might have on clients. 

It is an apparently marginal scene, and yet it already contains the entire film. Because what matters is no longer what the company is, but what the company must appear to be. Inclusion is not necessarily a practice: it can become an image. Diversity is not necessarily recognition of the other: it can become a marketing device. The employee is no longer merely a productive resource; they have also become an element of the company's reputational narrative. 

Brizé thus performs an extraordinarily subtle operation: he does not simply denounce the hypocrisy of capitalism, but shows how contemporary capitalism has learned to incorporate even its opposite. A company can speak of inclusion while producing exclusion, speak of well-being while organizing suffering, celebrate the individual while reducing them to a function. 

This is the true substance of Un bon petit soldat: not the distance between what is said and what is done, but the transformation of the lie into a perfectly functional form of social truth. 

Carla Moretti, played by Alba Rohrwacher, is the character through whom Brizé renders this contradiction more painful. She is a woman who has built her identity around performance. She works hard, she works well, she is always working. Yet beneath the apparent confidence of the executive lies what Brizé himself identifies as a profound insecurity and a persistent feeling that she is not fully legitimate in the role she occupies. And this is where the film becomes more interesting than a simple indictment of the corporate world. 

Carla is not merely a victim of the system: at least initially, she is also an unwitting accomplice. In order to be recognized, she must adopt its language. She must learn the language of strength, performance, absolute availability and decision-making. In other words, she must become what the system demands of her in order to be admitted into it. 

The paradox is cruel: to secure a place in the world of power, Carla must progressively renounce precisely that vulnerability which might have made her human. 

Un bon petit soldat is not necessarily someone who believes in war, but someone who obeys. Someone who keeps moving forward because stopping would mean losing. The true soldier of the contemporary corporation is not necessarily the cynical executive; it may also be the person who continues to believe that the system can be made more human from within. 

And Carla is precisely that: a soldier of corporate humanization. 

Her tragedy lies in slowly realizing that the institution for which she is trying to construct a human dimension is not interested in the human as such. It is interested in its representation, its usefulness, its profitability. 

The film thus becomes a reflection on the word care. A word that contemporary capitalism has appropriated with extraordinary skill. We care for employees, for diversity, for psychological well-being, for work-life balance. But care itself is almost always subordinated to performance and to control, including through those ridiculous training and sharing sessions organized by management itself. 

Human Resources then becomes one of the most ambiguous spaces within the contemporary corporation. It is called upon to protect people, but must do so without questioning the very apparatus that produces their distress. It must listen, but without necessarily being able to intervene. It must build trust while obeying those who measure everything through numbers, results and profits. 

Carla's drama emerges precisely from this schizophrenia. 

Brizé, after all, knows this grey area well. In his films about work, he has never represented conflict as a simple opposition between good and evil: his interest lies rather in the mechanisms through which apparently ordinary people end up becoming cogs in a system that no one, individually, seems truly to control. But in Un bon petit soldat there is an additional level of cruelty: the system no longer needs to appear violent. It only needs to be kind. 

A corporate video is enough. A word like inclusion. A welfare program. A diversity campaign. A meeting in which everyone declares that they agree. It is violence turned administrative, polite, smiling. It does not shout: it presents slides. It does not threaten: it calls meetings. It does not necessarily fire people brutally: it creates conditions in which the individual ends up feeling responsible for their own defeat. 

And it is precisely this absence of an identifiable executioner that makes Brizé's cinema so effective. 

Carla's private life further amplifies this fracture. The woman who must take care of the well-being of others can no longer take care of her own son. The professional whose task is to put other people's lives back together gradually watches her own disintegrate. The executive charged with managing other people's balance no longer possesses any balance of her own to manage. 

The question does not concern Carla alone. It concerns a society in which work has ceased to be simply what we do in order to live and has begun to become the means through which we prove that we deserve to live as we wish. 

Work becomes identity. Identity becomes performance. Performance becomes value. And value, ultimately, becomes a figure. 

In this progressive reduction of the human to what can be measured, Brizé identifies a contemporary form of alienation. We are no longer alienated merely because someone owns our labor: we are alienated because we end up internalizing the gaze of those who measure it. And Carla has already become her own overseer. 

The film is therefore less interested in exposing the company than in showing the terrible moment when a person realizes that they have transformed themselves into the language of the institution they were supposed to govern. 

From this point of view, Un bon petit soldat presents a perfectly rational world in which absurdity arises precisely from an excess of rationality. Everything works. Procedures work. Objectives work. Hierarchies work. Communication works. What no longer works is the human being. That is where exclusion begins. 

Brizé does not need to proclaim a moral. He merely has to observe the company's polished surface until it begins to crack. And beneath that surface emerges the old principle governing the new capitalism: it does not matter how much the company talks about people, as long as it continues to generate profit. 

Inclusion then becomes a commodity, vulnerability an image, care a strategy, diversity a brand, and the human being, once again, a variable. 

In this sense, Un bon petit soldat does not merely tell the story of Carla's downfall. It tells something more disturbing: the moment when one understands that the system does not necessarily ask us to be bad; it merely asks us to become good soldiers. 

The first condition of loyalty to an organization is therefore complicity.
— David Graeber