Full Time
In Éric Gravel’s slice-of-life thriller, a chambermaid and single mother of two struggles to keep her head above water as strikes cripple Paris.
Road to ruin: Laure Calamy
In this, his second feature, the French writer/director Eric Gravel tackles a theme that is not new but the approach that he takes to it feels inspired. Full Time is centred on Julie Roy (Laure Calamy) who works as a head chambermaid in a luxury hotel in Paris. The lives of its clientele could not be more remote from her own. Following a divorce, she is bringing up the two young children of the marriage with little help from her ex-husband who is behindhand with his alimony payments and rarely responds to phone messages. His behaviour leads to her bank cutting off her credit and, having opted to bring up the children away from central Paris, she has put herself in the position of having very full working days. She has to get up and feed the children before daylight, place them with an elderly neighbour (Geneviève Mnich) who looks after them and only gets back to collect them in the evening. She disdains seeking lowly work locally as a supermarket cashier but the fact is that she is accomplished as a chambermaid, albeit that she is secretly applying for a post even more suited to her skills, this being in the field of market research. But what is clear is that to keep going financially she is living a frantic life which leaves no time for real human relationships (she cares for her children when with them but is largely an absent mother and is imposing on the old woman who looks after them every weekday).
Full Time was made in 2021 and in that same year Emmanuel Carrère made Between Two Worlds which took a critical look at the desperate lives of those employed as cleaners on ferries and made to rush through their work in the limited time that the boats are docked in France. Even closer to Gravel’s film is the brilliant 2018 film by Lila Avilés which was actually called The Chambermaid and which similarly studied the limited existence of a cleaner in a posh hotel, albeit that that one was in Mexico City. Nevertheless, there is ample room for a variant on this theme and Full Time is enhanced by the way in which Gravel tells his story. What he has realised is that life today is such that almost everybody has felt frustration over delays and cancellations of public transport and that the upsurge of strikes has made this even worse. Gravel’s masterstroke is to tell Julie’s story at a time when her daily commuting is made exasperating by matters of this kind. Aided by the editing of Mathilde Van de Moortel, the film captures the routine, the unrelenting pace of life and the weight that Julie’s lifestyle imposes on her in a way that will surely encourage every viewer to identify with her. Furthermore, Irène Drésel’s electronic music score adds to the impact – and all the more so because it is not overused.
It is also the case that Full Time has another great asset and that resides in the performance of its leading actress, Laure Calamy. The last performance of hers that I saw before this one was in Her Way (2021) when I lamented that her evident talent was being wasted on an unsatisfactory film. Here, however, her role as Julie is worthy of her: there is no artifice at all in her playing and she makes Julie compellingly real. If, nevertheless, some queries do arise they stem from the screenplay and never from the acting (Calamy is key but all the players are persuasive). The viewer does wait to see whether or not Julie will come to recognise what she is doing both to those around her and to herself by living in this way. We certainly sympathise with her on observing the strain in what she does, but there is also a self-centredness in Julie. That is a side of her that is surely acknowledged in the writing, but does it recognise it quite enough? To be subtle is better than to be overemphatic, yet there is a sense of Full Time holding back more than one would wish and that even extends to the way in which it leaves it to the audience to decide the full significance of the abrupt ending. On the other hand, because the piece portrays life exactly as Julia experiences it from day to day, I do not side with those critics who feel that it is inappropriate for the film to show the severe inconvenience of strikes without expressing much concern about the conditions of those driven to take such action. Indeed, while the film is not quite the masterpiece that it might have been, I regard it as a work of some distinction and in no way do I begrudge it winning the awards that it has received.
Original title: À plein temps.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Laure Calamy, Anne Suarez, Geneviève Mnich, Nolan Arizmendi, Sasha Lemaitre Cremaschi, Cyril Gueï, Lucie Gallo, Agathe Dronne, Mathilde Weil, Dana Fiaque, Mareme N’Diaye, Olivier Faliez, Irina Muluile, Aymeline Alix, Evelyne El Garby Klaï, Manuel Husson.
Dir Eric Gravel, Pro Raphaëlle Delauche and Nicolas Sanfaute, Screenplay Eric Gravel, Ph Victor Seguin, Pro Des Thierry Lautout, Ed Mathilde Van de Moortel, Music Irène Drésel, Costumes Caroline Spieth.
Novoprod/France 2 Cinéma/Haut et Court/Canal+/Ciné+-Parkland Entertainment.
88 mins. France. 2021. US Rel: 3 February 2023. UK Rel: 26 May 2023. Cert. 12A.
