88 min | NR | February 3, 2023 | Music Box Films
Julie Roy cleans hotel rooms in Paris and raises two kids alone in a town an hour outside the city. A transit strike turns her commute into a daily emergency she cannot afford to lose. Getting to work becomes the whole thriller.
Julie Roy lives in a town outside Paris and commutes into the city to run housekeeping at a luxury hotel. She raises two young children alone. Her ex-husband owes her support payments he does not send. She wants a better job and has lined up an interview for a position that matches her old training. Then a national transit strike shuts down the trains and buses she depends on. Full Time is a film about how little margin a working life contains and how fast a single disruption can swallow it.
Laure Calamy plays Julie as a woman running a calculation that never resolves. She is always doing the math on time and money, and she is always a few minutes short. Calamy keeps the face composed in front of guests and lets the panic leak out only when no one is watching. Anne Suarez plays Sylvie, the supervisor who counts every late arrival and turns a missing minute into a threat. Genevieve Mnich plays Madame Lusigny, the elderly neighbor who watches the children and reaches the limit of what a favor can hold. The children, played by Nolan Arizmendi and Sasha Lemaitre Cremaschi, register every adult promise their mother cannot keep.
Eric Gravel writes and directs the film as a mechanism with no slack. He builds the story in near real time and cuts on movement, so Julie is always entering or leaving the frame. The camera stays close to her body and rarely settles into a calm wide shot. A percussive score runs under the action like a countdown and turns a hitched ride or a sprint to a platform into something closer to a chase. Gravel withholds the establishing shots that would let the audience breathe. The pressure stays on the clock and on her face.
Full Time understands that precarity is not a single catastrophe but a daily accumulation of near misses. Julie is competent and hardworking, and that is exactly the point. The system she lives in punishes one missed train as harshly as it would punish real failure. Gravel refuses to soften the math or hand her an easy rescue. The genre usually saves this kind of tension for guns and bombs. This film finds it in a woman trying to get to work.