Contemporary capitalism has discovered something formidable: it can devour you smiling.
He can ask you to perform beyond your possibilities, remind you that giving one hundred percent is no longer enough and, at the same time, invite you to take up the "stick of speech" to tell your colleagues about a moment of happiness experienced in the last twenty-four hours.
We need to share. Listen. Be resilient. Do team building. Have new eyes.
Even Marcel Proust is enlisted, or rather his most famous paraphrase: the true voyage of discovery would not consist in seeking new landscapes, but in having other eyes. Transformed into a sort of Perugina Kiss for managers, the French writer would probably ask for a transfer.
Welcome to Un bon petit soldat by Stéphane Brizé, presented in Competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival. A 102-minute French film starring Alba Rohrwacher and Vincent Lindon that transforms a posh insurance company into a battlefield with no visible corpses.
Or at least without corpses in the traditional sense of the word.
Because here what slowly dies is time, empathy, relationships, the possibility of being fragile.
And maybe even happiness, after having been diligently included in the meeting agenda.
Carla Moretti is 43 years old, with a brilliant career, impeccable appearance and the air of a woman who knows the road perfectly.
The problem is that he no longer knows very well where he is going.
Just appointed human resources manager of the Amali insurance company, she should reconcile the well-being of employees with the performance objectives imposed by the management. Then he comes across a case of toxic management and the line between compromise and compromise begins to become very thin.
Alba Rohrwacher beautifully avoids the trap of the uplifting heroine.
Carla is no Erin Brockovich. He does not come to throw open the windows, free the oppressed and uncover the pots of the system. She inhabits the system. He serves it. Somehow he defends it. And at the same time it is shredded.
He is executioner and victim. Accomplice and prisoner.
Brizé builds the character around an almost pathological sense of illegitimacy. Carla works tirelessly, excels, is talented, yet continues to suspect that she doesn't really deserve the position she occupies. What we commonly call impostor syndrome thus becomes a wonderful weapon in the hands of the company: if you think you owe something to whoever granted you the privilege of being there, you will be willing to grant them almost everything.
And here's the title.
The good little soldier is not necessarily someone who blindly believes in orders.
Perhaps more disturbing is those who begin to understand its horror and continue to march anyway.
There are moments when Un bon petit soldat seems like Fantozzi's company party after a master's degree in Human Resources and an intensive course in motivational English.
Except that perhaps in the accountant Ugo's universe there was more humanity.
Viscount Cobram, after all, really loved cycling.
Professor Guidobaldo Maria Riccardelli, albeit through pedagogical methods that were not exactly Montessori, sincerely believed in the Battleship Kotiomkin.
Here even the passions seem to have come out of a PowerPoint presentation.
We need to tell something good that happened in the last twenty-four hours. Passing the talking stick. Be participatory. Smile. Show enthusiasm. Transmit positive energy.
And of course you have to shoot a corporate video.
Because it's not enough to be virtuous. It needs to appear.
The CEO wants to be there. The brand must tell its story. The company must show values, attention, inclusion, sustainability, happiness, empathy and possibly even a well-pruned ficus in the background.
Brizé identifies with surgical precision what he defines in the pressbook as the "grotesque farce of corporate communication": large groups that have progressively begun to showcase ethical, environmental and human values to build a desirable image of themselves.
After all, when a company has to choose between profitability and virtue, the film harbors no particular illusions.
Shareholders care about revenues.
Not morality.
And this is where one of the film's most ferocious phrases arrives precisely because, apparently, it isn't at all.
«We take care of our customers. We take care of our collaborators."
A perfect slogan.
Clear. Inclusive. Unassailable.
Except, at that point, it sounds like a threat.
Because Un bon petit soldat tells of a world in which even words have been subjected to corporate restructuring. Exploitation becomes performance. Fear is a challenge. Fatigue is a lack of resilience. The control is called accompaniment. Obedience becomes team spirit.
George Orwell, in all likelihood, would have taken notes.
The masterpiece of the system consists precisely in having transformed collective responsibility into individual guilt.
If you can't do it, the problem is you.
If you experience burnout, perhaps you don't know how to organize yourself.
If the pressure is unbearable, you need to work on your ability to handle it.
In the pressbook Brizé insists precisely on the contemporary perversion of the word "resilience": a concept transformed by management into a tool through which to make those who can no longer tolerate the brutality of the system feel inadequate.
In short, the company breaks your leg and then organizes a workshop to teach you how to walk better.
Then there is Vincent Lindon.
And the choice is wickedly smart.
Because Brizé takes the actor who in their previous films has often been the body of the man crushed by work and this time puts him on the other side of the desk.
Arnaud Boronat is not a nineteenth-century ironworks owner. He doesn't wear a top hat, he doesn't evict widows in the snow and he doesn't caress a white cat planning to conquer the world.
It's worse.
He's smart.
He is charismatic.
He knows how to listen.
He knows how to choose words.
And above all he possesses the most precious talent of contemporary power: making almost anything reasonable.
Brizé himself leaves the definition of the character open: some will call him cynical, others pragmatic. But the charm and violence embodied by Lindon must continue to contaminate the film even when the executive is not present.
This is one of the most disturbing aspects of Un bon petit soldat.
Power no longer needs the boss to be in the room.
Once internalized, it works great on its own.
Of course the performance doesn't clock in and you don't go home at 6pm.
Carla follows.
It invades the relationship with the son.
He too must succeed. Improve. Give your best. Don't give in to fragility.
Officially for his own good.
It goes without saying.
In reality, Carla applies to maternity the same grammar with which the company measures its employees. Your child risks becoming a junior version of a quarterly goal: if you can perform better, why settle for simply being yourself?
Brizé focuses on the short circuit with cruelty: the woman who is oppressed by the rhetoric of performance ends up reproducing it on the person she loves most.
The KPI becomes part of the family.
And he doesn't even take off his shoes.
The most radical directorial choice is apparently very simple.
Carla almost never leaves work.
His private life reaches us through FaceTime, phone calls, voice messages, images on a screen. The son, the ex-husband, the loved ones: everything is remote.
Even intimacy has become smart working.
Brizé consciously chose not to show Carla outside the workplace: the private is dematerialized within devices and remote communications.
And it is perhaps the most effective visual idea of the film.
The office is no longer a space in which the protagonist spends a disproportionate part of the day.
It has become the world.
Rohrwacher runs from one meeting to another, answers phone calls, listens to messages, makes decisions. He is always late even when perhaps he is perfectly punctual. It is not she who chases time: it is time that sadistically enjoys running ahead of her.
Géraldine Mangenot's elliptical and nervous editing works precisely on this sensation: interrupted sentences, abrupt cuts, conversations that continue while Carla is already elsewhere.
No downtime.
Because even time, evidently, must perform.
Rohrwacher, on the other hand, seeks what remains alive between one performance and another.
He acts especially in the interstices.
In the millimeter that separates a professional smile from a grimace. In the second too long before answering. In that turn of her gaze in which the good soldier finally seems to realize that she is fighting the war against herself.
It is a test of subtraction and accumulation together.
The more Carla tries to control herself, the more the actress lets the cracks show.
Brizé says that it was precisely this ability to suggest rather than explain that convinced him to entrust the character to her: Rohrwacher manages to work in the space between what the words affirm and what the body betrays.
The actress moved to Paris to really work on the character's French and in the press conference she defined the process with Brizé as "all-encompassing". An extremely appropriate term for a film in which work ends up colonizing every inch of the human being.
And then there's What a Wonderful World.
Brizé opens the film with Joey Ramone's version, rough, accelerated, almost punk, of the classic written by Bob Thiele and George David Weiss. Further on, the unmistakable sound of Louis Armstrong resonates.
Same song, two worlds.
And above all a title which, in Un bon petit soldat, takes on a wickedly ironic flavour: "what a wonderful world", while around Carla work devours time, affections and perhaps even the ability to recognize one's own happiness.
On the other hand, in a film in which you have to tell your colleagues about a happy moment you experienced in the last twenty-four hours, listening to What a Wonderful World almost resembles a provocation.
As if someone, while the ship was sinking, had cared enough to put some flowers on the table.
To complete this neurosis there is the original music by Bertrand Blessing.
The drums pound.
He doesn't accompany: he urges.
Brizé imagined it by thinking of the rhythm once imposed on galley oarsmen, while the strings represent something more fragile and secret, a conscience that still tries to emerge beneath the noise of the machine.
It's a perfect image.
Capitalism as prison.
Except now rowers have LinkedIn.
And maybe they wrote "passionate about people" on their profile.
In the end, what remains above all is one sentence.
«We take care of our customers. We take care of our collaborators."
The more you repeat it, the less you believe it.
Perhaps this is the greatest achievement of Un bon petit soldat: showing how language can become the most elegant of instruments of coercion.
Fear becomes opportunity.
Tiredness resilience.
Obedience participation.
Brutality pragmatism.
And even happiness can be scheduled from 3.30pm to 4pm, right before the budget meeting.
Brizé returns once again to the question that obsesses his cinema: how to preserve one's humanity within a system capable of surviving only by inducing us to sacrifice one piece at a time?
Perhaps the truly good little soldier is not the one who follows orders without understanding them.
He is the one who understood everything.
He even saw the meat grinder.
And it keeps marching.
