About halfway through Éric Gravel’s Full Time, the struggling and constantly stressed Julie (Laure Calamy) arrives for a follow-up job interview. She had to spend the night at a cheap motel because the transit strikes made it impossible for her to get home, and she’s wearing a suit she bought that morning and changed into in the lobby bathroom. Her bank account is overdrawn. No one is covering for her at work, and she’s counting on a skittish trainee to hide her absence from their boss and clock her out at the end of the day. The elderly neighbor she relies on for childcare is saying that she can’t do this any longer, not for the kinds of hours Julie needs. Julie is constantly running, constantly in panic mode, constantly overextended, constantly needing to ask for favors.
But then she’s led into a conference room and told her interviewer will be with her in a moment. And for a few seconds, Julie, who has been in constant motion, is … still. There’s nothing she needs to do besides sit here and try to catch her breath.
Full Time makes this pause profoundly disorienting, because it knows you only wait when you have some reasonable expectation that what you need is on the way. For Julie, that’s almost never true. When it finally is, and that fact sinks in, Calamy–without a word–does some of her finest and most expressive work in the whole film.
Editor Mathilde Van de Moortel deserves a lot of credit for making sure this intimate, small-scale social drama has the tension and breathless pacing of a ticking-clock thriller. The grim realism of the movie’s stakes and obstacles–missing alimony payments, declined credit cards, cancelled public transportation, and shit-caked bathrooms–means that I can’t really call Full Time “fun” in the proper sense. It’s too stressful for that: sort of like Uncut Gems crossed with Bicycle Thieves. But it’s absolutely involving, even riveting.
If the film has a notable fault, it’s that it’s too easy to see Gravel–screenwriter as well as director–trying to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of misery porn and cheap inspiration. But since he pulls that admittedly difficult task off, it doesn’t matter too much that we can see how he did it; after all, this is storytelling, not a magic trick. It’s hard to diminish Full Time‘s frenetic effectiveness. It may be slick rather than weighty, but its style is part of its substance. Full Time is half-social realism and half-stress simulator, and if one part doesn’t work for you, the other will.
Full Time is streaming on Amazon Prime.
