Full time | A tense daily life ★★★½

Raising her two young children alone in the countryside, a woman must struggle to keep her job as a maid in a Parisian palace, while hoping to land a job elsewhere that better meets her aspirations.

Marc-Andre Lussier
The Press

Julie’s life resembles in all respects that of all these women, anonymous heroines, who miraculously manage to close all the breaches in their demented daily life to prevent their life – and that of theirs – from collapsing. Franco-Quebec filmmaker Éric Gravel, who has been living in France for years, has been able to perfectly translate this state of permanent tension, through which all the same sometimes arise bits of what makes the salt of existence.

The story offull timeps is built around the unforeseen grain of sand that comes to stop a whole skilfully elaborated, perfectly regulated mechanism, which allows Julie to get to the end of her day. And start again the next day. Living in the countryside – halfway between Paris, her place of work, and the place where the father of her young children lives –, the one who currently earns her living, rather modestly, by leading the team of maids of a Parisian palace sees its routine timed to the nearest second being completely turned upside down because of a strike in public transport.

So she runs, Julie. Nonstop. She runs after the pension that is slow to pay her ex to settle the rent. She runs to find solutions to everything: travel, the babysitter she loses because overtime accumulates, the job where she risks being fired because of her excessive delays, the lies she has to tell in order to to be able to honor the appointment she has made with a more interesting employer, from whom she then awaits news. In short, the superwoman is starting to get a kick out of it. And would like to be given a breakif only a little…

In Laure Calamy, Éric Gravel has also found the ideal interpreter to evoke Julie’s multiple inner torments, even if her character is still in action. Revealed thanks to the series call my agent (Ten percent), consecrated thanks to his performance in Antoinette in the Cevennes (Caroline Vignal), which won her a César trophy last year, Laure Calamy modulates all the registers with admirable mastery.

Having won Best Director and Best Actress in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival (somewhat the equivalent of the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes), Full time is currently showing.

Indoors

Drama

Full time

Eric Gravel

With Laure Calamy, Anne Suarez, Geneviève Mnich

1:27 a.m.

★★★½