The riveting Laure Calamy stars in a timely supply-chain drama.
Laure Calamy is the very best thing about Full Time (À plein temps), one of those observational French films that downplays politics for humanism — something American filmmakers seem unable to do. Calamy recently received a César nomination for this splendid portrayal of Julie Roy, a stressed, divorced white woman raising two toddlers despite a distant, deadbeat ex-husband who’s behind on his child-support payments. “You used to be funny,” a friend reminds her. “I know one person who doesn’t think so,” Julie responds. Yet, she conscientiously maintains her job as the head chambermaid at a five-star Parisian hotel.
There’s no grandstanding in Calamy’s Julie or in writer-director Éric Gravel’s presentation of her responsible resourcefulness — what American media hacks would call a “feminist hero.” Julie’s authenticity avoids social correctness; she achieves plain, recognizable motherhood, recalling the conflicted emotions in the song “Superwoman,” by ’90s R&B singer Karyn White. In a new kind of realism, Gravel chronicles Julie’s daily activities by concentrating on the wily and unafraid actions of a modern, alert being. And Calamy fulfills the concept with the same naturalness she displayed in last year’s My Donkey, My Lover & I.
Calamy needs a breakthrough hit to establish the level of celebrity of her compatriot predecessors Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Isabelle Adjani, Fanny Ardant, and Sandrine Bonnaire. Not yet an art-movie icon, Calamy conveys a sensibility that progressive Hollywood has been reluctant to define, although this movie might begin that process. She can be spontaneously crestfallen, like Diane Keaton at her most irresistibly candid. Calamy is less quirky and more quotidian and has a quick smile. It is the charm that Jennifer Aniston, Rachel McAdams, and Lady Gaga have been unable to put on the screen. Meryl Streep would kill to achieve the honesty of the mirror scene where Julie fights tears while making up her face. Gravel ingeniously uses Calamy’s commonplace attractiveness as the foundation of his social analysis; he mirrors Maurice Pialat’s no-makeup look.
Julie’s story takes place on the periphery of a national strike; she goes to work braving protests that delay her daily commute. Full Time studies the economics of working-class life but blessedly avoids the politics of social status. Instead, Gravel focuses on quotidian rhythms. This movie is as fast-paced and nervous as the action film Run, Lola, Run, but Julie doesn’t participate in a banal crime plot. Gravel and Calamy show us the average tensions of performing a job, dealing with co-workers’ temperaments and their hygiene, loving and contending with one’s children (an impatient daughter and annoying son who make recognizable demands).
Gravel’s discerning, to-the-point style is more expressive than the female stories in Tár or the tedious, unfocused Aftersun. He answers the old complaint that housework and motherhood are not valued the same as non-domestic careers. Julie knows her “career” potential and views it as a way of fulfilling her family duties. This attitude is unique for the millennium. Gravel and Calamy recall the beauty of Irvin Kershner and Barbra Streisand’s Up the Sandbox (1972), a rare politically conscious anti-abortion movie that extolled the pleasures and anxieties of womanhood but now is a forgotten classic of the American cinema renaissance of the 1970s.
Full Time implies an individual’s moral and socioeconomic preoccupation, evoking the 2018 Yellow Jackets protests in which French workers rebelled against the taxation that disproportionately afflicted common citizens like Julie. Gravel refrains from political specificity, but you feel the pressure of that populist movement when Julie hitchhikes to get to work on time (she can see the distant city smoldering as she approaches). “You never stop,” Julie advises a colleague. She fixes her erratic gas boiler at home and then relies on neighborliness that briefly rises into cross-ethnic desire with an amiable, multitasking black Frenchman, Vincent (Cyril Gueï).
Because the politics of labor and opportunity now strain and divide the culture, Full Time may move Americans as the supply-chain drama Hollywood ignores. The moment when Julie realizes her good fortune — Calamy’s sudden intake of breath is also an intake of hope — she faces her fate. She’s with her children in the middle of Jardin d’Acclimatation, an amusement park. This is real existentialism.
