An Urgent Ode to Worker Solidarity, Through the Eyes of a Desperate Woman

Railway strikes, needy kids, a birthday party to plan, a job in Paris (a long commute away), interviews for another job (which demand sneaking away from work), and a babysitter who is increasingly over it: The deck of Julie Roy’s life is full, and because that life is happening fast, Éric Gravel’s César-nominated Full Time establishes much of this fullness within only 15 minutes.

The movie does not waste time: Julie, played by Laure Calamy (Call My Agent!), doesn’t have any. The railway strikes make it harder and harder for her to get to work, as a chambermaid at a Parisian hotel, on time every day. This makes it just as hard for her to get home at a reasonable hour, which infuriates the older neighbor watching Julie’s children, because the children are exhausting. Julie wants a better situation. She used to be a successful marketing manager. She used to be married. Now, her ex-husband does not take her calls, pays alimony late, and places her mortgage at risk, to say nothing of sharing responsibility for the children. Julie is trying to get a better job — she asks her coworkers to cover for her while she dips out for job interviews, which they do, until they don’t — but there is no guarantee.

She is trying to be a good mother and a good employee within a system that seems intent on making this impossible. She leaves her current job off of her resume — the kind of detail that Full Time wisely allows to speak for itself. What is better: Trying to move back into the white-collar world with a 4-year gap that can be explained away by having children, or telling this new marketing firm that you’ve spent the last four years changing bed linens and wiping up after rich assholes (literally)? One of the great feats of Full Time is its quietly contingent view of worker solidarity. Even Julie’s hotel job is at risk because of this tension. The rail strikes that have the Paris metro area in a chokehold for the extent of the movie make Julie’s life near-impossible. TVs and radios are all tuned to the news throughout the movie, and the only news apparently worth hearing is of the strikes and the chaos that ensues.

It isn’t that Julie blames the strikes. It’s that she has to get to work. It isn’t that Full Time sets her in opposition to those strikers, despite their making her life that much more difficult. It’s that the movie is intent on showing us a ground-level view of labor, and of the effort to pull oneself up into a better and more equitable life (meaning: to make more money). It’s a view of labor in which the fates of the working class are intensely, tragically interdependent. There is no better way for the strikers to make their point, argue for their intrinsic worth, than to demonstrate the chaos of what will happen when they opt out. Julie’s life feels the effect of this, but only because the lives of the strikers have implicitly been subject to similar travails — this is what justifies the strike.

Julie can relate. Full Time doesn’t go out of its way to gussy up a hardened view of Julie’s actual job; it doesn’t slum around in the dirty details. A few precise scenes are enough to tell us what her life in the hotel is like. “The guests are very demanding,” Julie advises a trainee at the start of the movie. “The price lets them be.” We never see the guests. The lives of the chambermaids are so divorced from the hotel’s customers that the guests’ absence from the film only makes the hotel more plausible. They are supposed to be invisible, Julie instructs. She advises the trainee to wear better deodorant — her smell calls attention to her presence — and teaches her the traps laid out by the guests regarding, one presumes, stolen items and other professional miscarriages for which women in their line of work might be blamed. It is thankless work. It’s the kind of job where the workers have a code word for their worst-nightmare assignment — it happens enough, apparently, for there to need to be a code word. The code is Bobby Sands, after the incarcerated member of the IRA who died after a hunger strike in 1981. Sands is infamous for smearing the walls of his cell with excrement. The code word speaks for itself. When we get to hear the women use it, it’s because of one of those rich guests — a Scottish musician, of all people, who leaves the bathroom so sullied that only a power washer can clean the tile.

Full Time is political and topical, though not because it leans on a sense of discourse or goes out of its way to pain Julie in purely downtrodden terms. It is more so interested in characterizing Julie’s life as a fight, by default. Her worried face, courtesy of the expressive portraits of Calamy that fill and sustain the movie, speaks quite loudly on its own. Gravel has designed Full Time like an intricate, whirling trap predicated on the rhythmic repetitions of a workweek — only, day by day, more and more goes wrong. And when things go wrong, the movie gets to remind us of how contingent everything is. Each new interview for Julie’s new job opportunity means having to call on favors from her coworkers to be able to slip out. Each newly-crowded workday means the risk of getting home later and making her babysitter angrier. It’s a house of cards. You watch with a sense that any new detail will have the power to make it all topple over — and Julie with it. The movie is a thriller because it hangs on a set of practical, incurably dramatic questions. Will Julie get the job? Will she survive this? What else will go wrong?

Gravel’s strategies as a director work because they’re straightforward and efficient, just like his star, and just like the character she plays. Every scene feels short — every mishap proceeds amid an onrush of too much going on. We spend a lot of time watching Julie run — literally haul ass — from place to place, which is one of a few reasons that the movie has garnered comparisons to the work of Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, famous for their stripped-down, thriller-adjacent studies of working class contingency. I thought of Lorna’s Silence, watching Full Time, because of that movie’s indebtedness to the sound of Arta Dobroshi’s heels as she runs and frets from place to place, like a soundtrack to the urgency of her ordeal. I thought, too, of Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night, who has been charged with convincing her coworkers to give up their work bonuses in order for her to keep her job.

Julie’s leaning on the equally-vulnerable is an idea that Full Time shares. Julie must constantly call in favors — from her fellow chambermaids, the valet, the neighbor watching her kids, the people she begins to carpool with. Where Full Time separates from the Dardennes is in its modern sound and feel — it’s a faster movie than the kind they make, and its soundtrack, with its wall to wall techno-pulsing agitation playing throughout the movie, is like something out of a Safdie brothers picture, which is itself a style that throws back to movies’ Tangerine Dream era, a kind of devilishly catchy but threatening electronic groove.

Full Time is entertaining but appropriately nauseating. The movie arcs, in its own way, toward something like relief. But there is tragedy in even this. Because the relief should not be so hard-won: Julie’s future, her ability to provide for her children, should not come at such a high price. There’s a shot late in Full Time that shows Julie waiting, yet again, for the train. Only: we’re seeing her stand at the track’s edge. We are catching her from behind with her face in profile, turned toward the speeding machine as it comes. We can hear the train coming. It is impossible not to wonder if Julie will jump. The ending of Full Time is less like a breath of fresh air than like the panicked inhales of a woman who’s just been saved from drowning.

There’s no room, in this, for the kind of optimism that you can trust — there’s no certainty, still, no real, durative promise being made that from here on, all will be well. There is no one around to make such a promise. For some, Gravel’s movie might feel too reductive, too tightly sewn to the very bottom line of Julie’s life, and thus like too much of a thriller with too myopic a view of the life that it depicts. But what saves it from these flaws are precisely its well-timed moments of relief and the sense, even in the movie’s most harrowing, nose-to-ground moments, of how far Julie’s fate extends beyond her story alone. They are all — each one of the workers depicted here — leaning on as many other people as they can. They are going down together. There is no other way of spinning it. What should feel like laudable displays of care between vulnerable people instead become proof of the risks people pose to their own jobs, and their own fates, by offering to help others. Full Time works because of, not despite, its cutting thrills. The anxiety we feel as we watch is very much the point. Julie is living on the edge. The movie marvels at her ability to keep her balance. And it laments the fact that her survival should depend on it.