Everyday working-class struggle has always been a diverse boon for drama from the pre-Code late shifts of Wellman’s Night Nurse to recent works like Support the Girls and the films of the Dardennes. Their pressure-cooker Two Days One Night could arguably share a thematic double bill with Eric Gravel’s latest, but Full Time emerges as its own propulsive exploration of the day-to-day grind: the workday as a frenetic French odyssey drawing DNA from chase thrillers.
While the consequences seep into every aspect of single mother Julie’s life, Full Time hinges on the desperate challenge of commuting, turning the hustle for a ride and race to public transportation into an anxiety-laced ticking clock. Traveling from Parisian suburbs to her downtown job as a hotel’s head chambermaid is draining enough during a normal week, especially with children, alimony, and an increasingly frustrated nanny looming over each morning. But then a transit strike brings the subways, then the buses, to a halt and Julie (Laure Calamy) finds herself in a transportation rat-race for 9-to-5 survival. The fraught sprint to reach ever dwindling modes of transport — from mass transit to price-hiked cabs to carpooling until the traffic-clogged roads makes literal sprinting the faster option — intensifies Full Time’s familiar everyday into a full-tilt thriller. Anyone who’s raced towards closing subway doors on a Monday morning can relate.
Gravel’s kinetic direction turns every run for the train platform or hotel lobby to start another day into a blur of physicality and adrenaline. Face perpetually lined with stress, Laure speaks volumes through body language and expression alone. Even once she makes it to her job or back home, the stress never flags, only compounds. Soon, the challenge of the commute becomes a juggle of reaching another job interview with convincing co-workers to cover for her without getting fired at the worst possible time. The plates spin as fast as the wheels in Full Time, while always balancing Julie’s sympathetic struggle with her cutthroat desperation that seems to weigh most heavily on everyone but herself. The slice-of-life script delights in layering problem tripwires to make the next day’s sprint even more taxing, letting the audience watch the survival grind of capitalism trickle down through every adjacent life.
It might be disappointing then that most of those adjacent lives are reduced to thin sketches of personality rather than emerging as particularly compelling support characters. Even the women who have the most impact on the drama — the aforementioned nanny, Julie’s boss at the hotel, etc. — feel like fleeting presences, less characters in their own right and more problems to be dealt with. Perhaps that’s fitting of the go-go-go momentum of the plot (Julie barely has time to be with her children as is), but it does render the abrupt stop of an ending somewhat unsatisfying. The finale’s respite lingers between hope and the lingering thought that the light at the end of this tunnel might just be more a future of brake lights and tumultuous commute. Full Time’s breathless intensity fades but that transit strike tension never does.
Photo courtesy of Music Box Films
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