"Full Time" - DVD Review
Full Time centers on a young single mother, Julie (Laure Calamy), who works as the head maid for a five-star hotel in Paris. Her day begins before the sun’s; getting her children up and fed, dropping them off at a neighbor’s house, and then taking two trains and a bus to make it to work on time. Once there, her tasks are grueling, and the hotel guests aren’t much easier to deal with. It’s exhausting to work for little pay. Her carefully balanced world is thrown into chaos as transit workers go on strike.
Julie’s every race to catch a train or a bus is filled with the tension of a heist movie. The score is a synth-led, urgently pulsating accompaniment to Julie’s seemingly never-ending movement. Every moment of the day sees Julie in motion and it’s exhausting to watch. She chases after buses, trains a new maid (Mathilde Weil), and deals with the hell that is the hospitality industry. Not to mention the difficulty of raising two children (Nolan Arizmendi and Sasha Lemaitre Cremaschi) while trying to contact her husband and force him to pay for the child support he’s dodging.
courtesy of music box films
While Julie may be fictitious, her story is one that’s familiar to many people. It’s the norm to be overworked and underpaid with seemingly no possibility of gaining economic stability. Julie is one emergency away from losing everything she has, and the transit strike stretches her to the breaking point. It’s a devastating watch that oscillates between a stress-inducing panic attack (akin to Uncut Gems) and a quietly meditative reflection on the human experience. It might seem that these tonal swings would be jarring, but Full Time takes the quickly changing emotions in stride. What the film has achieved is an honest reflection of desperation and love in the stifling world of capitalism.
Over the runtime of Full Time, an ache develops in the heart of the viewer, because it’s impossible not to root for things to get better for Julie. While she may make decisions that are unwise or different than what someone in the audience might make, the movie doesn’t judge her. She, along with many real single parents, is forced to make impossible decisions every single day. Full Time is an angry indictment of the current state of affairs and an ode to the sacrifices parents make for their children.
Full Time is now available on DVD courtesy of Music Box Films. The DVD features an interview with director Éric Gravel, filmmaker Q&A from the French Film Festival UK, isolated score track, and the theatrical trailer.
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