This movie is a testament to how absolutely engaging the minutiae and the mundane can be. Forget bank heists and impossible missions, you’ll literally be on the edge of your seat wondering if this woman can manage to organize childcare, get to a job interview, and find a trampoline for her son’s birthday. I’m making light of it, but À plein temps (FULL TIME) (2021) is quite simply a beautiful, painful, arresting, and unromanticized portrait of a single mother who is just making ends meet in the midst of a transit strike.
Things begin with what I thought was a sigh, but turns out to be the exhale of someone in deep sleep. The camera moves over their lips and face, at first barely recognizable as such, but bathed in a warm glow. Then the moment is broken by the staccato beep of a cell phone alarm and Julie Roy (Laure Calamy) gets up from bed like she is a mechanical toy, the mechanism already wound for the day and she unable to fight its forward propulsion. She wakes her two young children—Nolan (Nolan Arizmendi) and Chloé (Sasha Lemaitre Cremaschi)—with gentle hands and words. As she feeds them breakfast, news of the transit strike—the snarled traffic, the protests, the people taking off work—blares in the background. She goes to the basement to relight the finicky boiler, dresses herself, prepares lunch for later, answers her daughter’s questions about an amusement park, and listens to the news about trains replaced by buses. Outside, it is still dark as they walk hand-in-hand through their village to an older woman’s (Geneviève Mnich) house who watches the children, along the way Nolan asking questions about his birthday party. As soon as the children are inside the door, Julie’s smile drops, her face becomes set and serious, she turns and runs for the train station, careening onto the train waiting on the platform before the doors close. Later in her journey a passenger gets sick, causing a small snarl in her daily commute. A run for a bus and then another train to get to the same place. A mere foreshadowing of the bleakness yet to come. As Julie nears work, her phone rings with a call from the mortgage company, which she deflects with the agility of a seasoned expert, suggesting that perhaps her financial status is not entirely stable and she is already adept at protecting her children’s home.
Currently, Julie works as the head chambermaid at a five-star hotel in Paris, but we see her negotiate with a co-worker to cover part of her afternoon shift later in the week so she can go on an interview for another job in market research, a field she left several years ago—risking the work she has now for the chance of something better, not unlike those unseen striking workers. In her current job she is careful and precise, making sure the rooms are perfectly appointed. But, she also tells a new maid to check inside every box because sometimes guests “lay traps for you.” We see her carefully aligning stationery on a desk, making beds in tandem with another maid, recruiting help to finish cleaning a suite when a guest shows up early. At the end of the day she pauses in front of her locker momentarily, taking a breath before she begins the journey homeward and the work of caring for her children.
Julie and her children live far outside Paris in a village that is better for their quality of life and closer to her ex-husband’s work, but now with the strikes the distance between here and there will begin to yawn like a chasm. At times it will be impossible to cross. She will be stuck on one side, her children on the other; she will be left begging the older woman to keep them in her care overnight because she has nowhere to send them. One her way home from work that first night she calls her ex-husband. She gets his voicemail and leaves a message about the alimony he owes her and about taking the children for the holidays. It seems frustrating, but benign. However, it’s only the beginning of the messages that go unanswered as her expenses grow and her money shrinks and her patience wanes. The trains eventually stop. The buses no longer run. Julie must rely on hitchhiking or black market cabs to get to and from work. She is late for work, late for her children. There is tension everywhere, everything seems to grind to a halt, except Julie, who never seems to stop moving.
My husband tried to imagine what elements in the plot would have to change in order for this movie to be about a father instead of a mother, but still have the same social commentary. The thought had never occurred to me because, simply put, you couldn’t make this movie about a father without inserting some other character or interest. It’s motherhood that makes it unique and poignant and believable in its edge-of-your-seat-thrillingness, which is, in and of itself, a whole other dissertation.
I want to be clear that Julie’s plight and her story feel extremely relatable, but that doesn’t mean that she is without faults. Or, because she is relatable she has many faults. Her actions at work get someone else fired. They endanger other people’s jobs. She lies with the fluid ease of a practiced tongue. But she does all these things to protect herself and her children. All of her steps outside societal norms are because she feels she has no choice but to lie or cheat or sacrifice someone else in order to keep her own head and her children’s heads above water just a little longer, and I find it difficult to blame her for that. Once, she misinterprets someone’s friendship as romantic overtures, and you can feel her second hand embarrassment burn through the screen when he leaves and she is left alone, stuffing the last remnants of her child’s party, and presumably her shame, into a cardboard box. Ultimately, her faults and flaws make her more relatable and sympathetic. Who amongst us isn’t pitted with a few dents and bruises? Who hasn’t burned with embarrassment of misinterpreting a situation? If you have children, who hasn’t felt that grinding exhaustion as you push forward anyway? Who hasn’t tried to shelter them from the outside world?
The movie feels like a keen observation rather than a tale of woe, which gives it a more neutral or balanced feel, though, of course, it is always the writer’s perspective we’re seeing. I read how writer and director Eric Gravel wanted to show the way people came together during the strike, but it seemed quite the opposite to me, which I don’t mean as any sort of commentary on the strike itself. In the beginning Julie is part of the mass of the commuters crammed into the train and metro. She eats lunch in the cacophony and chaos of the break room with the other maids. They come together to resolve thorny and disgusting problems at work. And even her issue of finding another job is somewhat supported by her colleagues. At home, she’s alone, but still grudgingly supported by the older woman who watches her children. She has that room to breathe, knowing that her kids are taken care of while she’s at work. As things progress, though, everything becomes more fractured. Julie and the other commuters are shunted onto buses and then into cars. Whereas in the beginning her face was almost lost in the crowd of other people on mass transit, now we see her in solitary close-up as she rides in a car with few people. As her commutes grow longer, her work colleagues become less patient, more concerned with their own well-being. Julie is left begging and pleading. Lying more often, risking more of this job for the shining promise of something better, risking her colleagues’ necks to save her own. She does much the same thing with her babysitter—overpromising her time again and again, sometimes lying about why she hasn’t arrived, but ultimately just trying to hang onto that sliver of a safety net until she can secure something else. And speaking of a safety net, let me tell you about one of my favorite parts of this movie, which really speaks to Julie’s journey into individualism. Determined to get her son the trampoline he wants for his birthday, she rents a van to transport the crated trampoline back to her house. Then, using a long rope as a kind of pulley system, she ingeniously unloads the crate into the backyard. After the kids have gone to sleep, Julie assembles the entire trampoline by herself, groaning and straining as she stretches the stiff springs into place, which seems like a very apt metaphor for stretching herself. At the party, when the children giddily climb onto the trampoline, a mother worriedly asks about the safety net, and Julie says it’s underneath the trampoline, explaining she simply couldn’t put it up by herself. The other parents then put up the net, while Julie keeps the children entertained with another game. And if that isn’t the best damn metaphor for this whole keenly observed story, I don’t know what is.
Julie keeps stretching herself, keeps grinding, keeps guarding her children against indignities, and keeps pounding the daily commute until she literally runs into a wall. There is a moment when her boss confronts her with her subterfuge, and Julie’s eyes go wide with anger and fear. She looks like a trapped animal. Her nostrils flare, sensing the danger that is closing in. Her eyes roll wildly, looking for escape. It so vividly expresses her vulnerability, despair, and deep well of resourcefulness. In that moment, Julie manages a temporary stay of execution. A momentary truce with her boss. But it is fleeting. She eventually reaches a point where her options feel so limited and bleak that when she walks toward a speeding train, I felt my whole body tense in morbid anticipation. But then, with the same swiftness of that train, comes the movie’s end, racing in at the last minute with a mixture of elation, euphoria, warmth—and just a momentary bit respite for Julie—before there is a tug forward, and we are left with the melancholy realization that there is no end to the momentum and scramble.
Overall Rating on the Chronically Streaming Pain Scale:
Chronically Streaming 