‘Full Time’: Propulsive film turns working and parenting into a thriller

Considering how much of our days and nights are taken up in the workplace, it’s remarkable how rarely this is dramatized in the movies. People in films may hold jobs, but we do not often see how their lives might revolve around them. Perhaps the reason why is that audiences go to the movies to get away from their work routine. But, artfully done, the working life of a protagonist is no less rich or redeeming than any other subject.

Case in point: “Full Time,” the propulsive new French film about Julie (Laure Calamy), a divorced mother who is attempting to care for her two young children while balancing her life as the head chambermaid of a five-star Parisian hotel. Written and directed by Eric Gravel, the film, paced like a thriller, picks up Julie’s life at a particularly fraught juncture: A nationwide mass transportation strike has turned her commute from the suburbs to Paris and back again into a frenzied obstacle course.

We follow Julie’s whirlwind life for a week – from dawn, when she feeds her kids and drops them off with a grandmotherly neighbor (Geneviève Mnich), to sunset, when she retrieves them, often profusely apologetic for arriving late.

In between, Julie’s life at the hotel is depicted in such granular detail that it’s as if we were privy to the inner workings of a secret, largely female society. Julie instructs her charges to obey the first rule of housekeeping: “We’re invisible.” We learn the lingo and code words they use to designate problem guests. The women’s harried conviviality belies their dissatisfactions, none more so than Julie’s, who trained as a market researcher and longs for a career change.

She places her co-workers in jeopardy to cover for her while she pursues a job interview on the other side of town. All the while, the metro and the trains are not running, the bank is dunning her for lapsed mortgage payments, she can’t get her ex to come across with the monthly alimony, and she is frantically organizing her son’s impending birthday party. (She wants to purchase a mini-trampoline.) Julie’s life was already hard-pressed. The strike delivers the coup de grâce.

And yet, she never really succumbs to despair, perhaps because she is in too much of a hurry. In the rare moments when we see her in repose, gazing silently through a window during one of her commutes as the landscape whizzes by, or sinking into a warm bath at home, she is almost eerily placid. Julie is most herself when she is on the go, and the film suggests that, for all her exhaustions, perhaps this is the way she feels most alive.

Calamy’s quicksilver performance certainly implies this. Julie confronts her hurdles as winnable challenges. She’s a fast talker and a quick thinker, and she has a gift for pivoting away from bad news. It might be stretching the point to call Julie a heroine – after all, she didn’t ask for any of these travails – but her tenacity to do the right thing for herself and her kids is valiant. (She chooses to live in the faraway suburbs because it provides a better environment for her children.) Her resilience has a heartfelt core that keeps her from seeming too shrill or strident.

Although Gravel doesn’t make a big deal about it, Julie also represents something larger than herself. Her plight as a single working mother is far from unique. But “Full Time” doesn’t ennoble the working class. Julie’s covert absenteeism, for example, inadvertently endangers the livelihood of another chambermaid who, it turns out, also has children to support. And fellow workers like Julie are the ones who are most affected by the striking transit employees. 

For all her impulsive imperfections, it’s clear by the end that Julie will survive, and that survival represents a balm amid this maelstrom. It will take much more than a railway strike to shut her down.

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “Full Time” starts a national rollout on Feb. 3. The film is in French with English subtitles.