“Who would like to read about domestic joys and struggles?” poses the latest incarnation of Jo March in Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women.” “Writing doesn’t confer importance; it reflects it.” Though the existence and persistence of her story, both within and outside the narrative, provide a counterpoint to such a fatalistic outlook, the line of thinking Jo expresses does still prevail. Culture produces stories that it thinks an audience wants to hear.
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Equally important, though, is how they are told. Domestic work and other “pink-collar” jobs rarely receive the kind of treatment given to them in Éric Gravel’s French labor drama “Full Time.” The cinematic valorization of vocational struggle with heroic protagonists and outsized stakes too frequently resides within high-status professions. Gravel finds one week in the life of Laure Calamy’s Julie Roy, the head chambermaid in a swanky five-star Parisian hotel, surely contains more drama and tension than those of the guests whose beds she prepares with pinpoint precision.
With a neorealist’s eye for domestic detail and social structure, “Full Time” follows Julie’s agonizing quest to better the life of her family by securing a better job. In Gravel’s estimation, climbing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs makes for a more treacherous ascent than Everest. The filmmaking stays true to this sensation by making Julie’s life feel as volatile and tenuous for the viewer as it does for her. It’s a high-octane thriller fueled by the sweat and stress of a woman about to burst from trying to hold it all together.
This divorced single mother of two was previously an enterprising knowledge worker before familial obligations pulled her attention. Now, she treks all the way into Paris from an exurban outlying community just to scrape by in the service economy. The labor itself might be monotonous drudgery, but Julie brings remarkable professionalism to the operation. Fluid tracking shots by cinematographer Victor Seguin quickly establish her mastery over this occupational domain.
Julie still has the professional skills and work ethic to perform the duties of the marketing manager job, which she strives to secure in the film. An outside observer might ask what’s stopping her from pulling herself up by her bootstraps and charging confidently back into the corporate world. The answer, Gravel shows, is not so simple.
She’s dependent on a tattered network of support in everything from her transit to childcare that stretches both her money and her energy. (Having a deadbeat ex-husband certainly complicates matters.) And during the time period observed in “Full Time,” those all fray to their rawest nerves. Even as the film ratches up in intensity and velocity at the feverish pitch of Irène Drésel’s propulsive electronic score, it never moves so fast that it loses sight of Julie’s tenacity amidst society’s antipathy.
This fragile arrangement faces its first test thanks to a transportation strike that hobbles her geographic mobility. While striking workers in Europe can play as a punchline for foreign audiences, it’s not a matter of convenience for Julie but her very livelihood. It costs her precious time and capital to navigate between the different realms of her life, which then causes additional friction with her childcare. Gravel highlights the most insidious element of management interests allowing conditions to deteriorate to the point of striking — it slyly pits the interests of workers who share a common cause against one another.
In these fast, fleeting moments of transition, “Full Time” manages to wring the most tension. Julie has no such luxury to decompress as most people do as they traverse from professional to personal spaces. She’s in constant motion, a blur across the screen when captured by Seguin’s camera from a distance. Even if it’s not the physical motion of her body traversing at a harried pace across the urban landscape, it’s the ceaseless tumult that Calamy’s fiercely committed physical performance makes evident in the character’s eyes.
For most of “Full Time,” Gravel only grants viewers the ability to read that calculating visage up close when Julie remains still to engage in transactional conversation. When she’s in motion, the camera prefers to contextualize her as just another striver in the crowd or piece of the landscape. It’s a convenient (and yet sufficiently complex) shorthand to convey the whiplash between the changing gears of her life. When the film begins to reach its breaking point along with Julie, that language shifts to film her both in close-up and in frantic motion.
It’s here, trapped with her in a desperate rush to preserve her livelihood while pursuing some hope of future prosperity, that the film’s commentary becomes unmistakably felt. The economy is a game rigged against those who do not start ahead of the pack. But even those who realize this truth on a guttural level still have no choice but to play it. “Full Time” proves there’s just as much to gain from watching people fight for small, incremental victories in this stacked system. Molehills to the rich feel like mountains to the working class, and Gravel finds the stylistic tools that can translate such scale into riveting cinema — and confer the kind of importance that the Julies all over the world deserve. [B+]