Streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Éric Gravel’s drama is a movie filled with so much tension and suspense, yet it’s a movie that has no actual villain. There’s no criminal or abusive spouse or corrupt officer. All there is is time that constantly seems to be working against our protagonist Julie. In a world where being a single parent becomes tougher and tougher, Gravel has offered audiences easily the most universally relatable drama in a very long time. Despite its setting, “Full Time” is wonderful often emotionally exhaustive exploration of a single parent, Julie, who is tasked with trying to keep her world above water. This becomes even harder as she’s tasked with caring for two children, both of whom are demanding of her constant attention.
Julie can ’t catch a break. For a single mother raising two children in the suburbs of Paris but working in the city, the commuter train is a lifeline–and it’s suddenly been severed during the latest transit strike. Without the train, Julie can’t get to her job as the head maid at a five-star hotel–or to the interview for a better job she has lined up. Out of desperation, Julie turns to neighbors and her own gutsy resourcefulness to get to work and barely makes it back in time to pick up her kids before bedtime. Worse yet: it’s only Monday. Julie is at her breaking point and soon finds herself bending the rules to stay afloat in a ruthless society as her responsibilities pile up.
We’re never made privy to the circumstances that brought Julie to her current point, all we know is that she’s consistently working against the clock. From the moment she wakes from her bed, her time is borrowed, and she’s often seen throughout the movie racing against a world that’s furiously working against her. Along with two growing children, she’s also faced with a job that calls for her to travel across town, and a nanny that is on the verge of changing her own life. This immediately conflicts with Julie who literally has no one else to step in and help her. There are fleeting moments where she’s filmed leaving messages for an absentee husband on her phone demanding that help her raise their children, but it’s never entirely a focal point.
Instead Gravel keeps Julie constantly running back and forth and struggling to keep it together, which makes it even more impossible as the looming transportation strike looms around the corner. What makes “Full Time” such a universal story is that everyone that’s ever been a single parent can relate to what Julie endures. Gravel spends so much time focusing on her outward stress and constant worry, all the time briskly editing scenes of her trying to make it to her work place, and anxiously fleeing to make it back home for her children. “Full Time” does take time to reveal the more vulnerable moments in Julie’s life, including an awkward confrontation with another parent during her children’s birthday party.
It’s a sad intermission in what is a woman who still craves some form of intimacy in a life filled with obligation and stress. It helps that Laure Calamy, technically the sole cast member of the film, is just so powerful in her role, and conveys so many dimensions of mental stress, sadness, anger, and so much else. We wan to see her excel, we hope she pulls through and it only makes her experience all the more riveting. “Full Time” is assuredly one of the most stressful and anxiety inducing movies of 2023, and it’s a film that pretty much anyone tasked with caring for children can click in to an empathize with.