'Full Time' Movie Review

There's a moment near the end of Full Time where Julie Roy stops running. Just stops. And the relief is so disorienting you forget what watching a still image used to feel like. Eighty-eight minutes earlier, the film opened on her sleeping body, the camera close enough to hear her breathe, and somewhere between then and now, you'd stopped breathing too. That's the Éric Gravel trick. He made a drama about a single mother trying to get to work, and he shot it like a thriller about a woman who can't.

If you've never heard of it, here's the case. Full Time premiered in the Orizzonti section of the 2021 Venice Film Festival and walked away with two prizes (Best Director for Gravel, Best Actress for Laure Calamy). It picked up more acting hardware at Les Arcs, and in 2023 the film's score won composer Irène Drésel the César Award for Best Original Music, making her the first woman ever to win that prize. For a French film with almost no English-speaking name recognition, that's an absurd haul. The wins are earned in the texture of how this film moves, not in the premise of what it's about.

The premise is small. Calamy plays Julie, a divorced mother of two, head chambermaid at a five-star Parisian hotel, commuting in from the suburbs every day. A national transit strike hits. Her ex is late on alimony. Her nanny is close to walking. There's a job interview for a position better suited to her actual qualifications, and she has to sneak out of work to get there. None of that sounds like a thriller. Gravel shoots it like one anyway. Cinematographer Victor Seguin's handheld camera moves at Julie's speed, jagged when she runs, locked on her face when she pauses to negotiate with a babysitter or a boss. Editor Mathilde Van de Moortel's cutting is so quick you miss half the steps in Julie's morning routine on a first viewing. 88 minutes, and the film does not let you sit down.

The score is the secret weapon. Drésel is a French techno producer, a genuine club artist and not a film composer who occasionally dabbles. Full Time was her first feature score. What she put under the train sequences sounds like a rave that has gone wrong, propulsive and synthetic and slightly ill. It shouldn't work for a film about a chambermaid juggling daycare and a metro strike. It absolutely does. The whole film is asking "what is the tempo of modern survival," and Drésel's answer is: 130 BPM, no breaks.

Calamy is in almost every frame, and the Best Actress prize is undeniable once you watch her work. There's a scene where she's in the waiting room before her job interview, sitting across from a row of younger men, all of them relaxed, all of them sure. She doesn't say anything. She just calculates. The film does this a lot. It cuts away from the dramatic peaks (we don't see the actual interview) and stays with the buildup and the crash. So Calamy's job is to be the entire emotional weather of the movie in a face that's trying very hard to look composed for one more meeting with one more person who has power over her life. She is doing something in the silences that the script doesn't ask for.

A few things worth knowing going in. Gravel is French-Canadian, born in Quebec and trained at Concordia in Montreal, and he now lives in the Sens area of France. He wrote Julie based on people he saw on his own commute, mostly women going into Paris and back every day. The character's dread of not making it home in time was inspired by his own father, who raised him as a single parent in Montreal while doing a commuting job. Calamy did her homework too. To prep for the hotel sequences, she spoke with Sylvie Kandi, a CGT union leader who had represented striking chambermaids at a Paris hotel, asking about their pace and the way the work breaks the body by the end of a shift. That research reads on screen. The hotel scenes feel earned in a way most films about service work do not.

One more craft note. Gravel and his colorist deliberately tinted the Paris exteriors colder, so the city would feel hostile to Julie, while the hotel rooms shift palette depending on the room you're in. It's the kind of choice you don't notice consciously and feel the entire time.

The honest pushback. Full Time is so committed to its tempo that it gives you almost nothing about Julie's interior life outside the gauntlet. We don't really know who she was before the marriage ended. We don't know what she wants from the new job beyond escape. Some viewers will find this lean, others will find it thin. The film earns its narrowness, in my view, but the last five minutes ask you to feel something the movie hasn't fully paid for. The ending is a tease, deliberately so, and your tolerance for it will track exactly with how badly you wanted Julie to get one good day.

If you liked Uncut Gems but always wished it was about labor instead of greed, this is your film. If you've ever sprinted for a train you couldn't afford to miss, also your film. The Dardennes did this kind of working-class realism for thirty years. Gravel takes it and gives it a pulse. Full Time is on Brew TV and it is exactly 88 minutes long. Watch it on a weeknight after a particularly stupid commute. You will recognise Julie even if your job and your country are not hers.

It's a great little film. Sit with it.