Full Time

Eric Gavel’s “Full Time” is a film that takes a storyline following an ordinary working-class person as they attempt to keep their heads above water in a society that seems set up to ensure that will fail at said task—the kind of narrative that the Dardenne Brothers have made a specialty out of in recent years—and presents it via the kind of breakneck pacing that will remind viewers of the similarly headlong “Run Lola Run” while leaving them almost as exhausted as its central character by the time it is all over. These two concepts may sound wildly incompatible, but the combination ends up succeeding more than it doesn’t as it offers up the sight of a film that looks and sounds like a nail-biting thriller but tells a story that a number of viewers will be able to relate to on an intensely personal level.

The film’s protagonist is Julie (Laure Calamy), a single mother of two kids who lives in the suburbs of Paris but commutes into the city for her job as the head chambermaid of a swanky four-star hotel. For her, this is not the ideal situation—she is struggling to make ends meet while waiting for her ex to pay alimony and the nanny (Madame Lusigny) who watches her kids while she is gone ends up seeing more of them than she does. However, there is one bright light on the horizon in the form of a job opening at a marketing firm that would be a much better fit for her skill set than her current occupation. To make it to the job interview without letting her intentions be known to her supervisor at the hotel will require some iffy behavior on her part, including coaxing coworkers to risk their own jobs by covering for her in her absence but in this case, she figures that the risk is worth the reward.

The problem is that Julie is totally dependent on public transportation to get her to and from work and, as anyone who is in the same circumstance can attest, any number of things can happen that are theoretically out of your hands but which can still have enormous repercussions on one’s livelihood. In Julie’s case, a week that is already going to be hectic because of the job interview becomes even more so when a citywide transit strike is called—although she barely seems to pay it any mind when it is being discussed on the news, the reality of its impact hits as the simple act of getting to work, let alone on time, becomes only slightly less fraught than the truck journey in “Sorcerer.” Despite the city being brought to a near-standstill, Julie goes to extraordinary lengths to try to make it work—rushing from transit terminal to another in the hopes of finding a still-running train or bus, hitchhiking or using her rapidly dwindling funds to pay for a van rental or a jacked-up cab fare—but she can only keep her metaphorical plates spinning for so long before the inevitable crash.

The notion of applying an action film feel to someone going about their daily routine may seem a bit precious, perhaps even contrived, but it is a conceit that Gavel is able to pay off effectively. From a technical standpoint, the construction of the film is very impressive as the combination of Mathilde Van de Moortel’s editing and Irene Dresel’s score (both of whom received Cesar nominations for their efforts) gives the film a sense of real tension right from the get-go and sustains it for the entire running time—even the rare moments when Julie is able to steal a minute for herself are hardly a respite as we can sense how guilty she feels for even those all-too-brief bits of calm. And while it may sound like a bit of a gimmick, anyone who has ever raced to catch the bus to work as it is about to pull away from the stop or has waited on the platform for a late train to arrive will easily recognize the pulse-pounding feelings that Julie is experiencing simply from the sheer effort required to make it to and from work.

At the same time, the film is careful not to completely let her off the hook either, whether in regards to her stubborn determination to be employed in the city despite a horrific commute under the best of circumstances in order to live up to her dreams of upward mobility or her general lack of concern for the motives behind the strike in general or how her efforts negatively impact everyone from her children to her overtaxed nanny to co-workers who wind up paying the price for her behavior. Although her efforts to better herself are admirable, the same cannot always be said for Julie and it is to the credit of both Gravel’s screenplay and Calamy performance (which both also received Cesar nominations) that they were willing to paint her as a recognizably flawed human being as opposed to some kind of cruelly oppressed saint.

“Full Time” does have a couple of problems that it doesn’t quite manage to work around. While it is a key plot point that Julie never really displays any significant curiosity about the strike that has affected her life so deeply, the film likewise doesn’t really seem to have much to say about organized labor, the conditions that would lead to such a paralyzing strike or whether it is in favor of such actions or not. As a result of this, the final moments of the film in which Gravel tries to wrap up his story prove to be a bit unsatisfying when all is said and done. For the most part, however, “Full Time” is an intelligent and mostly engrossing film that takes a situation that will seems all too familiar to many observers and presents it in a manner that brings together quietly observed humanism and palpable tension and somehow makes it work.

Now playing in select theaters. 

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