Item: Full Time (À plein temps) (2023)
Rating: 5
Author: MaryAnn Johanson

I can’t believe it’s taken this long for someone to make a movie about single-motherhood as a relentless heart-in-your-throat ticking-clock thriller. (Please let me know if I’ve missed one before this! I don’t think I have.) I’m not a mom of any stripe, but I have friends who are single moms, and for the past three years I’ve lived with a single mom and her young son. And I’ve seen how absolutely precarious it is, every day, balancing work and child care and a woman’s own sanity. Just the other day I had a conversation with my housemate about how people who are not single parents simply do not see what a full-on circus-level juggling act it is.

And that’s at the best of times, when everything is going well! Everything is not going well for Parisian Julie (Laure Calamy), and it is not the best of times. Single mom to two smol gradeschoolers, Julie commutes from the suburbs every day to her job as the head chambermaid at a five-star hotel in town. She’s out the door with the sleepy-headed kids before sunup to leave them with a neighbor — who will take them to school and later collect them afterward — so she can run to catch the train so she can get to work on time, for a boss who is less than sympathetic to Julie’s struggles. As far as we can see, Julie does great work at her job, but late-capitalism has decided that being a pain-in-the-ass stickler about clocking in and out at precise times is more important than happy(ish) employees getting their work done as needed.

Full Time Laure Calamy — Oh, it’s also Julie’s son’s birthday this week, so she has a party to plan, too.

Julie’s day is high-stakes nonstop on a regular basis, but at the moment it’s even worse, cuz there’s a transit strike on, and getting into and around Paris has become a nightmare. Replacement buses are packed, taxis are all taken, and even hitchhiking or carpooling means you get stuck in traffic jams. (I was in Paris this past November during a transit strike: drivers were actually hopping out of their gridlocked cars to punch one another, the stress was so high. It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen in either London or New York, which have their own transit issues.) In the midst of this mess, Julie is sometimes resorting to racing — literally running — through the city to get where she needs to be. And it’s never a romantic, touristy Paris, either: Full Time’s is a gray, rainy landscape of grim concrete, with nary a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower or pretty jardins to be seen.

What’s more, this week Julie also has an interview for a much better job, which, if she gets it, will improve her life immensely. But how do you get to an interview when 1) you can’t let your hardass boss know what you’re up to, 2) the city is at a standstill, and 3) and you need to show up all calm and cool and professional?

Honestly, I’m more than a little surprised that a male filmmaker, writer-director Éric Gravel, made this movie. Gravel lets the details of Julie’s situation drip-drip out to us, and every revelation just adds to the incredible tension that is her daily grind: trying to keep all the little moving parts of her life in sync where there is no margin of error. Some of these disclosures will garner nods of recognition from anyone who knows how unforgiving the world can be for women. (Her ex, the kids’ dad? He’s fucking useless, which is another task on her to-do list: begging him to be less than useless.)

Calamy is a knot of coiled desperation throughout; she’s magnificently intense. There’s a moment at the end of the film when we suddenly fear that hopelessness has caught up with her — oh my god, I was not expecting such heartstopping suspense, even after all the palpable anxiety that comes before that. This is very different from her work as the charmingly besotted talent-agency assistant in Call My Agent! — the role she is so far best known for — but just as powerfully sympathetic.

Full Time could not be more timely, what with a cost-of-living crisis and not-unconnected waves of industrial action sweeping the globe, or more intimate: Gravel and Calamy’s focus is laser-tight on one woman’s attempt to keep her life together while everything around her seems to be falling apart. This is as real, and as recognizably stressful, as thrillers get.