French cinema comes to the Lido with A Good Little Soldier and One Minute to Midnight, by David Katz.

Each year in competition at Venice, there seem to be around three slots reserved for French directors, possibly of works that were rejected from Cannes’ main competition. With it not hurting to have stars for showcasing on the red carpet, and at the Sala Grande premiere, these selections sometimes fall to films that might not have a large theatrical life beyond western European territories; Cannes, by comparison, is where the French films that play across the world often first show.

Stéphane Brizé’s A Good Little Soldier has the most international potential compared to Cédric Kahn’s A Place to Heal (which screened in the first few days), and Nicolas Pariser’s One Minute to Midnight, yet it’s still arguably the weakest of these. Brizé has had a worthy career project examining France’s corporate and labour worlds, looking especially at how technological advances contribute to a feeling of dehumanisation in these spaces. Produced by the large French studio Gaumont, who also made Brizé’s last Venice entry Out of Season, this film - which has a commanding, “above-the-title” lead performance from Alba Rohrwacher - creditably attempts a satirical tone, with its exaggerated depiction of the working culture at a dull, but highly successful, Paris insurance company, yet you can still feel the director holding his breath before reaching his key aim: giving a blunt sense of the misery and soul-sickness of his characters.

Alba Rohrwacher plays Clara Moretti (her character background maintaining her real Italian roots), the company’s HR head, which grants her a seat at the table at all of its executive board meetings, where Brizé pointedly shows that she’s still the only woman present. She has two main challenges at work to solve: finding the right tone for an insipid corporate recruitment video they commission (a plot touch reminiscent of Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, purposefully or not), and managing a case of severe workplace bullying from a manager to a staff member she supervises. With every scene, bar the Zoom calls Clara logs into, taking place at this glassy, neutrally-coloured maze of lifts, escalators and open-plan offices, we can see how she’s willingly isolated herself from her family, as she haplessly tries to co-parent her young son, also largely on Zoom, pushing him towards academic success he’ll never achieve.

The actors are good: beyond Rohrwacher, whose verbal dynamism at certain moments never breaks her overall sense of control, there’s the CEO Arnaud, played by Vincent Lindon, who Brizé has some fun giving him no-nonsense dialogue decrying “woke” culture, and his employees’ sensitivity. Although you can see the influence of the late documentarian Frederick Wiseman, as it tries to anatomise and bright to light an enclosed space whose inner workings say a lot about contemporary society, the dramatic conflicts it focuses on instead are too simplistic, whose complexity is predicated on easy ironies about the limitations of Clara’s value system, as it applies to her domestic and work life.

The highest-profile festival bow to date by Nicolas Pariser, whose previous films have played in Cannes’ Quinzaine des Cinéastes sidebar and at Locarno, One Minute to Midnight shows an emphasis on conversation and dialogue unusual even for films where that propels the story. If A Good Little Soldier has designs on being a deep-digging character study, Pariser’s film convincingly achieves this, as it gradually reveals a deeply broken man in Melvil Poupaud’s Léo, a former writer and now-publishing consultant now living in Nancy, who returns to Paris, where he spent his 20s and 30s,, to settle his late father’s affairs and reconnect with friends at a hip literary magazine he used to be part of.

That above précis may sound horribly indulgent and familiar, but Léo and his generation are subjected to real scrutiny in Pariser’s script, particularly regarding the MeToo-like culture that was cultivated at the magazine; Léo, their star writer, groomed and then dated an intern, whilst their boss, now a prestigious publisher, is the subject of a much larger exposé of abuse. He is an absent father to his bright daughter Emma (Clara Pacini), who holds far greater political convictions than him, and his own troubled relationship with his parents is also brought back to the forefront, after learning of surprising details in his Italian father’s will, who he never knew.

Discussions of left-wing politics, cinema, gender relations, and Jewish identity (Léo’s mother was Sephardic Jewish) dot the characters’ long exchanges, in a strong, adult drama that digs its hands right into contemporary French cultural affairs, leaving us with discourse and contradictions impossible to neatly resolve.