Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Eric Gravel
Starring: Laure Calamy, Anne Suarez, Geneviève Mnich, Nolan Arizmendi, Sasha Lemaitre Cremaschi, Cyril Gueï, Lucie
Gallo
I've never understood French audiences' love of Ken Loach, given how
France boasts several filmmakers who have done a far better job of
chronicling the struggles of the working class. With his second film,
Full Time, you can add writer/director Eric Gravel to that list.
Utilising a filmmaking style that feels influenced by his compatriot
Stephane Brize, Gravel turns a week in the life of a working stiff into
a powder keg potboiler with all the tension of a heist movie. Like
Parasite, it's a movie that highlights how good people are forced to take
unethical action in order to simply stay afloat in the rising waters of
late capitalism.
Julie (Laure Calamy) lives in a commuter town in the North of
France but works as a head chambermaid in a five star hotel in Paris.
This requires her to wake up before dawn has even considered cracking,
feed her two young kids breakfast, prepare their lunch and drop them off
at the put-upon elderly neighbour, Madame Lusigny (Geneviève Mnich), who spends more time raising them than their own mother. Then she
hops a train to the city and begins a gruelling day of cleaning up rich
people's shit, literally in some cases.
Like so many in the service industry, Julie is over-qualified for her
job, and so she's constantly applying for jobs that match her background
in market research. One upcoming job interview looks like it could
finally be the one, but the trouble is it's scheduled during Julie's
shift. Compromising her co-workers, Julie juggles things around to allow
her to attend the interview, but there's also the issue of a looming
public transport strike. She's also constantly being harassed by her
bank for failure to pay her mortgage, and her ex-husband, who is late
once again with his alimony payment, won’t answer his phone. She also
has to keep sight of the fact that she's a mother, with a kid's birthday
party coming up at the weekend and no presents yet purchased.
To paraphrase Melle Mel, Julie's life is like a jungle; it makes you
wonder how she keeps from going under. She's close to the edge, trying
not to lose her head. Like all the great French actresses, Calamy can
switch between playing a glamorous goddess and an everyday chump with
ease. As Julie, we see her deploy her charisma to get her out of
scrapes, batting her lashes at a doorman in order to commandeer a taxi
reserved for hotel guests, though an attempt to seduce a kindly
neighbour goes disastrously wrong, likely because the man in question
suspects she wants a babysitter/chauffeur rather than a lover. In a job
interview Julie switches into go-getter mode, fully convincing as a
product of the corporate world. But most of the time she's a put-upon
victim of the daily grind, constantly rushing from one place to another
(there are shots of Julie legging it through the streets that would make
Tom Cruise tired) and deflecting phone calls that will land her in more
trouble.
There are sequences in Full Time that feature its heroine
performing relatively mundane tasks, but Gravel shoots and edits them
with such energy that Julie might as well be Jason Bourne. What makes
these mundane scenarios so tense is that most of us will have found
ourselves in similar pickles at some point. Those of us who rely on
public transport (if Julie thinks Paris is bad, try negotiating a
sprawling city like Dublin that doesn't even have a functional bus
service, let alone a subway) will feel Julie's pain as the simple act of
getting home from a day's work begins to resemble the evacuation of
Dunkirk. Even when Julie manages to get a few precious minutes alone in
a tub with a glass of wine, the moment is interrupted by maternal
obligations.
Unlike Loach, who likes to portray working people in a patronising
fashion, Gravel hasn't created an angelic figure in Julie. She's so
ruthless in her determination to improve her lot that she gladly
sacrifices her co-workers by asking them to compromise their own
positions. When Madam Lusigny complains about being stuck with Julie's
kids from dawn to dusk, it's hard not to agree that Julie is exploiting
her elderly neighbour. But it's the very fact that Gravel is willing to
present us with a flawed protagonist that makes it so easy to empathise
with Julie, and it also highlights how the system forces those on the
lowest rungs to climb over others. There are no real villains in
Full Time, and everyone who presents an obstacle to Julie's progress is simply
trying to get by themselves, from the striking train drivers to her boss
at the hotel, who we suspect has given Julie enough rope to hang herself
by this point. If there's an antagonist in Gravel's film it's simply
modern life, which increasingly leaves us less and less time for
living.