We take a deep look at a new piece of French social realism...
Director: Eric Gravel
Starring: Laure Calamy, Anne Suarez, Nolan Arizmendi
Running time: 87 minutes
An odyssey of emotional tension inside of the relentless rush of modern-day materialism; Full Time is French director, Eric Gravel’s, cinematic exploration into just how much stress one woman can withstand. Over the short span of ninety minutes the audience follows a week in the life of single mother, Julie Roy, who's already deeply exhausting existence becomes tenfold more strained in the face of a sudden Parisian rail strike that throws her work/family balance into complete disarray.
The overwhelming sense of anxiety in Full Time is rooted solely in the material world. The film's frustrations lie at the hands of capitalist infrastructures, with Julie’s only path toward calm being a desperate attempt to appease capitalist hegemony by subscribing to the draining competitiveness of social mobility.
The rail strikes, whilst being the plot device for Julie's additional stress, are not actually at the root of her misfortune. On the surface, yes, they debilitate her life, they stop her from getting to and from work, to and from her children. But these strikes only shine light on the real object of her deeply difficult life: the capitalist greed of an already bloated state. Acting less so as a massive monument of destruction, the background’s wobbly labour laws showcase the futility of such strike action. Strikes are synonymous with socialism. Yet, in Julie’s life, there is no Marxist consensus amongst the people most affected.
Julie is head maid at a five-star Parisian Hotel. The strikes affect her and fellow maids most intimately, and it is because of this, there is no detectable union amongst them. Rather, the strikes sow a sense of stressed division amongst them. Instead of banding together, the strikes provide little time, or energy, to consider the plight of one another, ratting one another out if it means saving themselves. The sustained tension between the maids reads less as a crushing condemnation of the characters, and more so an acknowledgement that the crushing weight of capitalism has just become tenfold more unbearable with the sudden disruption to their only transport into work.
And thus, the relentless misery of capitalist limitations that are enforced unfairly onto these women, day to day, has inverted the intended effect of the strikes for the working-class individual. Whilst we can claim that strikes are means of unionising the people, we must first acknowledge that they also massively inconvenience and divide them first.
Due to being enraptured by their own fiscal limitations, they can only, and will only, support one another if it doesn't shake the foundations of their already rocky social standings
This film does not, however, condemn strikes as a means of insufficient protest. In fact, Gravel makes it apparent that these strikes are creating significant ruptures in the apparatus and ideology of the state. But not first without creating issues impossible to overcome for the individual.
As a femme-focused film, with obvious anti-capitalist underpinnings, the way women in the workforce are continually devalued as workers and deprived of the same levels of autonomy as their male co-workers is impossible to avoid. The autonomy of these adult, female maids is constantly infringed on by their bosses, never being provided the same levels of leniency as their male counterparts.
The weight of capitalism on the average worker is depressing enough, but the way in which the females of this film find their economic suffering exacerbated by their womanhood acts as an extra layer of modern-day misery in Gravel’s story. The collective character arc of the women in this film seems to end on the resolute question: how are women workers supposed to provide support for one another under such intense social scrutiny?
Capitalism has forced women into a sense of conditional care. Due to being enraptured by their own fiscal limitations, they can only, and will only, support one another if it doesn't shake the foundations of their already rocky social standings. Gravel makes sure never to depict any of these women as overly emotional, irrational young women who have a childish inability to "hold their own" in the workforce. Rather, the opposite. All of the women, and particularly our protagonist Julie, are strict in the face of severity and social disruption; it is this quiet, stern complacency to struggle that makes this film so emotionally devastating.
Toward the denouement of the film, where Julie has just about reached the human limit of how much stress one human can bear, she still manages to find time, and money, to take her two young children on a day trip to an amusement park. And it is as she watches her children play, call her over, express their love, that the film reaches its highest point of emotional violence on the audience. It is in Julie's realisation that everything she does is for her children that the film's whole notion of; strikes, worker alienation, and stress accumulating on top of stress that the audience is affronted by the abysmal acknowledgement that she is not living, she is merely surviving.
As our emotionally exhausted protagonist finally allows herself to break down, with her children around her loving her unconditionally and unknowingly. Gravel leaves us with the message that humans are not designed for this type of life and capitalism will only show misery and conflict amongst us.
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