Alba Rohrwacher Excels in a Biting Satire of Corporate Wellness Culture

The Italian actor discusses her role as a high-flying HR executive forced to fight for her survival in A Good Little Soldier, screened at Venice Film Festival

“I’m not able to do a character if I don’t connect myself with something internal first,” insists Alba Rohrwacher, star of Stéphane Brizé’s new razor-sharp polemic on corporate hypocrisy. A Good Little Soldier begins as Rohrwacher’s character, HR manager Carla, presents a video made to attract graduates to work for her Parisian insurance firm, in which the company virtue-signals by flaunting its disabled employees. But the video is swiftly shot down by its unapologetically un-PC CEO Arnaud (Vincent Lindon) for “making [him] want to puke”. What follows is a series of excruciating set pieces and situations that showcase the shallowness of corporate language and employee support systems – as well as the soul-crushing hollowness of the nine-to-five slog.

Set in the metropolitan centre of Paris – a “nightmare”-zone, Rohrwacher says – Brizé’s verite-style film brought the Italian actor together with a large non-professional cast, who drew on their own in-office experiences. It was Rohrwacher’s second time working with both Brizé and Lindon, after the French filmmaker’s 2023 romance Out of Season.

“I knew in advance that this kind of journey with [Brizé], with this character, would be a very intense and tough one because of [her] complexity,” Rohrwacher explains when I speak with her during a roundtable at Venice Film Festival. “First of all, [Brizé] asked me to learn French – for real. He wanted me to be the person that could be in that position in a French company as an Italian woman.”

Real-life testimonies were an important part of Rohrwacher’s embodiment of Carla, a mother rushed off her feet who is totally wedded to her email notifications. “For me, it’s a struggle and it’s emotional and very sad too sometimes to listen to stories [from office workers], but also to see the involvement, the trust and the energy that they are giving to such a sick system, such a violent system … a system of survival.”

Co-written by Brizé, Coralie Amédéo and Olivier Gorce, the film follows Carla’s attempts to balance not only the crisis of the video – which she worries has put her job on the line – but a situation involving workplace bullying. A recording surfaces proving that a manager, Madame Lalouette (Carine Rouvier), has started a campaign of harassment against her employee, Madame Morel (Sandra Le Gall). Carla doesn’t want to stick her neck out by firing Lalouette, but when she tries to throw Morel a life raft by moving her to a different department she herself winds up in the firing line.

“She’s like a child,” says Rohrwacher, commenting on one particular scene in which Carla is confronted by both her line manager and the CEO, “two men against the woman”. “She thinks that this system is good because she trusts people. So she, as a soldier, is not questioning the system because she [thinks], ‘If I do what they are asking me to do, everything will be fine because they are good.’”

Though he appears in only a handful of scenes, Brizé’s longtime collaborator Lindon excels as the company’s laughably brutal CEO, who makes his employees tremble – the antithesis of his roles in their previous films like The Measure of a Man, in which he is usually on the receiving end of workplace injustice and cruelty. Reuniting with Lindon “was very natural,” Rohrwacher says. “He’s such an incredible, immense actor. He has a very strong energy.”

In Out of Season, the duo’s chemistry was romantic, but here they have the dynamic of predator and prey. Lulled by Arnaud, Carla has “the feeling that [she is] in a safe place. You open yourself a little bit to the other person, [who] has the power.” She mentions a scene in which Arnaud gives Carla a pat on the back, and she momentarily gains the confidence to crack a joke about pasta in her native Italy. “There is a funny carbonara joke, but there is also something very deep that happened to her.”

Alongside her job, Carla attempts to keep up with her parenting duties – but the film proves that by trying to please her insatiable bosses she will forever be at her bandwidth. Therein lies the film’s all-too-relatable tragedy. Rohrwacher says the authenticity of Carla’s situation was what attracted her to working with Brizé again: “We find a way of working which is very similar, because he’s looking for some kind of truth [in] the situation and the character.”

All this is scored by pulse-raising, militant drumbeats by composer Bertrand Blessing. The film has the atmosphere of a high-octane drama with the walls close in on its protagonist: besides her Metro commute, we never see Carla leave the anonymous office building. “[With] the shoot, it’s like everything melts [together],” recalls Rohrwacher. “It was like being possessed … without possibility of escape.”

Rohrwacher has another film at this year’s festival, in which she plays a very different kind of mother. In Anna Foglietta’s Una Storia, her character is a mother who has an identity crisis when her 18-year-old daughter flies the nest. “Maybe one is the French society, and the other one is the Italian society – [in Una Storia I play] a very warm mother, a very devout mother,” she muses. “Maybe it’s too much. Maybe in the middle there is the solution!”

Fans of her filmmaking sister, Alice Rohrwacher, are also hotly anticipating the silent film Three Incestuous Sisters, in which Alba reunites with the star of La Chimera, Josh O’Connor. Has it completed filming? “Who knows?” laughs Rohrwacher, insisting the project is hush-hush. “Maybe there is a secret camera here.”

If Carla learns her lesson by the end of A Good Little Soldier, it’s that “she’s someone still trapped in the system,” explains Rohrwacher. “She’s not a hero. She doesn’t say okay, fuck you. She’s not able to do it. But she’s conscious.”