REVIEW / FILM OPINION – Éric Gravel’s “Full Time”, with Laure Calamy in one of his finest performances, tells the real world in thriller mode, taking the viewer on a frantic race to survive. A brilliant film, masterfully written, directed, and performed.
Full time: run too slow down time
It sometimes happens that a screenwriter and director finds the ideal harmony between his subject, his staging, and his interpreter. A perfect match that allows you to take your film out of the genre where you would put it a priori. An agreement that makes an object with moving contours capable of arousing a thousand emotions. It is thus in this rare and precious category that we can place Full time the second feature film by French-Quebec director Éric Gravel after Crash Test Aglaé. It is also the third leading role for Laure Calamy after Antoinette in the Cevennes and A woman of the world.
In Full time, we follow Julie. A single mother who raises her two children alone, who lives a good distance from Paris where she works as a cleaning lady in a large hotel. You quickly learn that this is not his first job. Indeed, she is desperately looking for the time to go for interviews to resume the course of a career put on hold to take care of her children.
His days are long, going by at a hellish pace. On a ridgeline, near the burnout in a society that itself is cracking on all sides, will Julie get out of it?
One survival high-flying social
Full time is the portrait of a woman and a critical discourse on contemporary society. But it is above all a sensory experience. The film opens with Julie’s breath and skin, as close as possible to the character, and we won’t get away from it. A feeling of appeasement and calm emerges, before giving way to a mad train, launched at full speed, which will leave neither the character nor the spectator any rest.
Filmed as a thriller, Full time is panting. We hold our breath and we are hypnotized by Julie’s races in the streets of Paris, her heels clicking on the asphalt, her breathing becoming jerky.
Julie holds her life and that of her children at arm’s length, with such force that one would even say that she holds the world in this way. One will undoubtedly find a more rigorous comparison – although full-time transcends its genre – one would almost feel glued to it like Jason Bourne in the exceptional Waterloo station sequence of The Bourne Ultimatum.
There are true lives at stake, a future to reach, Julie is a warrior who fights without any respite, without complaining or attributing his difficulties to others. The choices she made before, those she makes in the present, are not judged because they are then a matter of pure and simple survival.
The story of a world plagued by its obsession with performance
Full time happens in the present, and only the present exists in this exemplary account of the management of suspense. Will the car start? Will Julie lose her job before finding another? Will she be able to get her RER in time? ‘Cause if we don’t make it this real-time then there will be no future…
“Time is money“. This highly cynical principle is at the heart of the film. Éric Gravel places his portrait of an exceptional woman of courage and determination against the backdrop of a social movement that is paralyzing the Ile-de-France. Strikes and social movements are shown without any misery or desire to position themselves. Full-time focuses on Julie’s daily struggle, far from global social and political issues, and in doing so delivers this collective state of exhaustion a very accurate painting, at the right distance.
Something is broken in our world, its engine has definitely raced and leaves individuals on the sidelines, or on station platforms where the trains no longer arrive. You have to be punctual, you have to make the beds to the millimeter, you have to earn money and put the children to bed on time, you have to be presentable and friendly in all circumstances. In the world of Full time, freedom and control of time are thus very abstract concepts.
Laure Calamy, new masterclass
Full-time was featured in the Orrizonti section of the 78th Venice Film Festival. And he was awarded two prizes, Best Director and Best Actress. A double reward means that the performance of the actress has not “eaten” that of the film.
