In “Full Time – One Hundred Percent” the Canadian director living in France Eric Gravel describes Julie’s day with children to care for and media strikes
It could be a thriller or a sampling of anguish and anxiety. Instead it is the account – very realistic it must be said – of a few days in the life of a mother, a woman like many others, separated with two small children and a daily journey to reach and return from the workplace. Daily routine, which many women have to and know how to face, were it not for a small inconvenience: the strike of the means. And what seemed feasible suddenly becomes impossible.
«I live in the province – said the director Eric Gravel a The world
– and I know what it’s like to have to move to get to Paris. When the protest of the “gilets jaunes” broke out, I had already written a good part of the film but I felt a rage rising inside me, the need to express the frustration many had found themselves in ». Unable to move. Just like Julie, the protagonist of Full Time-One Hundred Percentwhich we discover in bed when the alarm goes off and it is still dark outside.
Here begins her daily odyssey, that of a separated mother with two children that she must entrust to a neighbor to take them to school, since when the bell rings she must already be at work or almost, and then run to the station to catch the train that should take her to Paris. It should, because at an intermediate station the loudspeaker announces the stop of the train “due to strike” and Julie has to think about alternative buses and subways to reach the five-star hotel where she is responsible for the services in the rooms. It happens the first day, to go and also to return, but it happens above all in the following days, in an increasingly wild and unexpected way: a kind of boulder that falls on poor Julie and a thousand other people like her, who don’t even have the strength. to protest: they just have to try to solve the problem. And those who cascade down from it.
Gravel, who also wrote the script, doesn’t need to invent too many situations. What happened on the first day and what he told us with great precision (the increasingly crowded vehicles, the journeys on his feet, the rush to get to work as quickly as possible, the reproachful looks of his manager. complaints of the lady, no longer very young who accompanies the children to school and keeps them waiting for the return – always later – of the mother), she also shows it to us in the following days but in a more synthetic, more elliptical way. Instead, what grows every time is the sense of anxiety and anguish with which the protagonist has to deal, more and more late, more and more suffocated by events that she does not control, more and more alone.
The ex-husband who does not pay alimony hides behind the answering machine, the bank employee who looks for her for non-payment of the mortgage payments does not give her peace, some work colleagues are anything but cooperatives, the lady who acts as a babysitter no longer holds two too lively children, daily travels they become real odyssey between hitchhiking and replacement buses … and as if that weren’t enough, in a few days it’s her son’s birthday and she should also come to an interview for a new and more rewarding job.
Beginning as a kind of realistic comedy, the film then picks up the pace of a thriller, accompanied by the metallic sounds of Irène Diésel while Victor Seguin’s photography is increasingly tinged with dark tones, like the night that often surprises Julie still far from having finished her duties.
But the film wouldn’t have been so successful without Laure Calamy’s performance, able to smile when she is with her children but ready to explode (or almost) when things just don’t seem to want to go the right way. Without her the film would be incomplete, without her we would only be worried about how it will end, but when faced with her interpretation we end up identifying with her, conquered by the empathy we feel for those who have decided to row against the wind. She is ready to challenge anything, whatever it takes.
March 29, 2022 (change March 29, 2022 | 20:24)
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