(Credit: Press)

Eric Gravel’s second feature, Full Time (released as À Plein Temps), is a moving, ultra-realistic portrayal of the harried, precarious life of a divorced mother of two as she copes with child care, work, and transportation. The filmmaker’s skill raises these mundane circumstances to the level of a suspenseful drama. The film makes painfully clear how easily a small disruption can completely derail even the most carefully planned and scheduled life, with particular attention and sympathy directed at single mothers, but making a point that can apply to many.

The straightforward title, which suggests an ordinary work week, is faintly ironic in light of the obstacle course it represents for the protagonist. The film’s impact and appeal come from the attention to detail and plausibility and its success in making the audience share the protagonist’s stress and desperation and feel genuinely invested in her efforts to resolve it.

Julie Roy (Laure Calamy) is the head chambermaid for a five-star Paris hotel, a demanding and painstaking job under a finicky supervisor. Julie is conscientious at work, caring and involved with her two children, but is left with barely enough time for sleep. She is hopeful about finding a better position and is taking steps in that direction when minor changes throw her carefully balanced life into chaos.

First, her daily childcare plans begin to fall through; and second, there is a breakdown in public transit due to a strike. Those two flaws in her daily plan lead to other difficulties. Although seemingly trivial, they cause the flimsy supports of her life to fall like dominoes as Julie works frantically to keep up, both at work and home.

Laure Calamy took the Best Actress Lumiere Award for the role, as well as at the Venice Film Festival and Les Arcs European Film Festival. Her earnest, understated performance is what makes the minimalist script work, expressing Julie’s devotion to her children, her modest ambitions, and her suppressed panic as the framework of her daily routine crumbles.

In a film which focuses intensely on the central character, the actress brings to life the small but painful dilemmas of trying to give her son a birthday party with little money and no time; or of risking her current job to pursue the chance of a better one. Julie’s struggles are made real enough and sympathetic enough to provide a genuine suspense story.

Julie does represent a multitude. The transit strike, which is the primary disaster in Julie’s life, is presented without casting blame or suggesting a conflict of interests. The transit workers are presumed to have difficulties and legitimate grievances of their own, like the other people who inadvertently cause Julie inconvenience or trouble: her fellow chambermaids, her ex-husband, and her babysitter.

Even the eventual outcome of her struggles could clearly have gone in another direction, depending on minor, uncontrollable events and what seems little more than luck. Director Gravel draws the audience in with a tense, sympathetic, well-told Everyman tale.