Full Time

Synopsis: Single mother struggles to keep her job and care for her kids during a transportation strike in Paris. (Streaming on Amazon as of July 2023) French movie title:  À plein temps

In Full Time we get a glimpse of Julie Roy’s life as a single woman working full time to support her children. It’s her misfortune that her low-paying job sucks, her childcare is unreliable, and her ex is late on child support payments. This all might somehow be manageable if not for her greatest misfortune: she relies on public transport in Europe’s number one strike zone.

Julie works in Paris. She does not reside in Paris because she is neither rich nor a tourist. She commutes from one of the towns, Bourgogne, outside the banlieux (suburbs) that constrict the city. She is determined to keep her little family in an affordable area with trees and houses. Before each workday’s sunrise, Julie marches her children to the house of an elderly babysitter, Madame Lusigny (Geneviève Mnich). Good luck getting to the city. A word on strikes…

Synopsis:  Single mother struggles to keep her job and care for her kids during a transportation strike in Paris.

Strikes have fallen by the wayside in the U.S. because citizens have been conditioned to associate them with communist agitators. The narrative since the 1930’s has been that corporate overlords are eminently reasonable while strikers are thugs. Never mind that unions endeavor to ensure members a living wage and improved work conditions. 

La France keeps the strike tradition alive and no one does it better than the SNCF railway workers/ les cheminots belonging to Sud Rail. I first became acquainted with these pranksters when I was trying -emphasis on trying- to get from Paris to Strasbourg in eastern-most France. I knew there was a rail strike, but I thought I’d be safe because the international lines were shut down and, as far as I knew, the Allies got Strasbourg back from the Germans last century. Alas, I was mistaken. All of the Germans returning to Deutschland were rerouted via Strasbourg, aka my train. Message to Sud Rail: How about NOT striking once in a while to give all of us proletariats a break?  Back to Julie’s travails…

Julie and her compatriots wait and wait for morning trains, then run to platforms where lines are rumored to be running. Commuters know that cursing the strikers will not help, so they get on with it. It’s a nightmare getting to work. Julie is late to work each day of the strike. Many times, she literally runs to her workplace.  At the end of her long day, Julie is desperate to get home to her children, who see less of her than the babysitter who is running out of patience with the late pick-ups. Nothing like hitchhiking in the pouring rain to give one a real zest for life.

I should let you know that Julie is played by Dix pour cent‘s Laure Calamy, who can do anything. Her Julie says and does whatever she needs to in order to bring a paycheck home. Her face, her eyes, even how she catches her breath shows us how she must suppress her feelings and think as quickly as she can to successfully navigate each day.

Ms. Julie is a manager of housekeeping at a five-star hotel in Paris. Naturally, there are fewer people on staff than needed (maximize those profits!), so the women who work as chamber maids dash from room to room. Julie organizes everyone’s schedule. She reminds staff that the guests demand perfection. I feel like the dino robots who staff many Japanese hotels would not take kindly to reprimands for a wilted flower in a room’s floral arrangement. A quick hiss in the direction of a snooty guest would be an effective reminder that no one is perfect and if they want to keep all their fingers, they’ll show a little respect.

So, Julie not only manages, she cleans too; getting her hands quite dirty. One morning, a maid runs to her for help with a situation. The “Scottish singer” who stayed at the hotel the night before not only trashed the room, but managed to get sh** all over the bathroom. (Isn’t it always the Scottish singer?) We are spared the sight, but poor Julie has to man a pressure washer to rectify things. To add insult to injury, she is later scolded by her supervisor for using a machine to clean the “delicate” porcelain tile.

The filmmaker, writer-director Eric Gravel, spares Julie no challenge. Take a bus home at night? Non! The busdrivers are now on strike. One day she needs to take a taxi –that she cannot afford– across several arrondisements. Don’t worry, she won’t have that expense again because the cabbies will strike. The strikes are contagious as all the unionized transportation workers strike in solidarity. Dear God, I thought, the rail workers must have the highest hourly wages in all of Europe what with the annual strikes. What more can they want? Season passes to Paris Saint-Germain? Lunch with Léa Seydoux?

I will let you in on a little secret that Julie confides to a sympathetic colleague: she is looking for another job. It seems that Julie took the first job she could get after she and her spouse (the guy who doesn’t send the support checks) split up. She has a university degree and marketing experience, but she sidelined her career to care for her two children. Now she has a chance for a better-paying job in her field. But don’t get your hopes up because nothing seems to go her way. 

As if Julie doesn’t have enough to do, she decides to get her little boy a trampoline for his birthday. Someone should have counseled Julie against the insanity of buying a 300 pound “toy” that requires the strength of a blacksmith and the skills of a mechanic to assemble. You can bet that Julie will be wrestling the trampoline together under the moonlight with about a half an hour to spare before she has to get into Paris by hook or by crook again. 

Full Time makes a suspense movie out of a woman’s quotidian struggles. Can Julie actually get away with using her lunch hour to somehow get to an interview elsewhere in the city? I half-expected her to plunge into the Seine and swim there. And, unable to find her from time to time, her manager is getting suspicious. O no, she might lose her job. But I thought, once hired, the French couldn’t get fired!

I thought that after the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen) guaranteed the no-firing thing. Maybe it does not apply to women? Maybe, while the compatriots in Les Miserables were busy singing of revolution and “barricades of freedom” in One Day More, tyrannic élites removed the no-firing safeguards for citizens?

Julie could use some luck. I mean, I became afraid that she would drop dead from exhaustion! Maybe she could work from home for the railway, organizing the strike schedules and picketing shifts. That, mes amis, is living the dream that workers from Seoul to New York have: No More Commuting.

Movie Loon’s Movie Review Shortcut:

Grade: A-

Cut to the Chase: Brilliant lead performance by Laure Calamy as Julie. Suspenseful, with a humane POV.

Humor Highlight: I suppose it is the ludicrous-ity of trying to overcome a transportation strike. I mean, if the President of France can’t do it, how can a rank & file citizen do it?