A few days before the second round of the French presidential election, Éric Gravel and his heart on the left were furious. “We will go to vote by covering our noses and we will wait for the legislative elections in June”, said the filmmaker, from his home in Yonne.
Since then, the ballot has brought Emmanuel Macron back to power, and Éric Gravel landed in Montreal to accompany his second feature film, Full time…. at 40are Rendez-vous Quebec Cinema (RVQC). Yes, the man is from Quebec.
Story of a mother who runs endlessly to maintain some semblance of normality, Full time takes a look at a social phenomenon. That of living in the countryside and working in the city. The film allowed the filmmaker to receive the director’s award at the Venice Film Festival, in 2021, Orizzonti section, and Laure Calamy to leave as best actress.
“I wanted to talk about people who get up early, take the train, go to work, come back in the evening… They have very long days and, at the slightest grain of sand, everything changes, explains the one who is established at the campaign. I thought I had made a marginal choice, but I realized that a lot of people live far from Paris. »
Camped on the left, but without appearing radical — “I don’t want to be a Manichean,” he says — Éric Gravel preaches a social cinema imbued with feelings, rather than cookie-cutter speeches. He is a fan of gray areas, those that “show all the facets”.
Neither all black nor all white. Or, as in his personal case, neither quite from here nor quite from there. His accent betrays his origins. Twenty years ago, this Montrealer by birth and graduate of Concordia University chose to pursue a career in France. It is in a Paris jostled by transport strikes (what could be more Parisian, gossips will say) that takes place Full time. A month after its French release, here it is on the RVQC ramp.
” It warms my heart. It’s like presenting it at home. A way of saying… I am a Quebec director who shoots French films, ”claims the director.
an impressionist film
Without condescension, Full timerevolves around a woman unable to make the right choices. Already caught in the family-work whirlwind, this employee of a large hotel is suffering the repercussions of the paralysis of transport.
“Collective anger is expressed because there is individual anger,” believes Éric Gravel, inspired by the social context and popular fed up. The one who started writing the screenplay before the outbreak, in 2018, of the yellow vests also drew on his memories of a 1995 strike. The foreign student at the time had witnessed a beautiful outpouring of solidarity.
“I wanted, he says, a character who is poorly represented, who has no megaphone. I really liked this contradiction. The film could have been called A woman alonebecause the Julie he imagined “tries to manage on her own, lacks resources, constantly seeks help”. Full time is a one character work filmed on edge. “I stick to his sneakers,” says the Quebecer, who was able to resist the French accent, but not the vocabulary.
Laure Calamy, he did not discover her through the series call my agent (titled Ten percent in France) like the majority of us. “I knew her from the cinema. I saw her in A world without womenin only beasts, by Dominik Moll, where she plays a mother. The character is quite tough, and I needed a bright girl. Laure could balance the character, give it an extra soul that wasn’t on paper. »
“I didn’t want a sociological film, I didn’t want us to watch this woman. I rather wanted to feel her from the inside, to be with her, to accompany her,” he replies when asked why he thinks he almost signed a genre film.
It is true that with the rapid camera movements and jerky electronic music, the tension is not lacking. Yes, it is a social film, recognizes its author, but sensory, “impressionist”.
He also likes to think that the New York of the 1970s as it is filmed by Sidney Lumet and John Cassavetes is reflected in the closed spaces he stages. It was European cinema that attracted him to France, but he is also a fan of American cinema.
Humble and seemingly down to earth, Éric Gravel does not claim to be unique. Even as a Quebec director who signs French films. May his dark portrait of the world of work not be the only one in 2022 (Another worldby Stéphane Brizé; Ouistreham, by Emmanuel Carrère), seems revealing to him: “It shows that things that concern us are in tune with the times. We hope to tell the right things at the right time”.