Christos Kefalis, editor of the journal Marxist Thought, argues that French director Éric Gravel’s new film Full Time (French: Á plein temps) presents a remarkable cinematic social critique of contemporary capitalism.
Full Time, dir. Éric Gravel, 2022
A very interesting French drama film has premiered lately in our theaters. First presented in 2021, Full Time (French title: À Plein Temps) won awards at the Venice Film Festival of the same year, as well as at other major international festivals.
The film’s heroine Julie (Laure Calamy), head maid of a luxury hotel, is constantly on the run to catch up with her mounting obligations and worries. Divorced and living with her two children, she endeavors to raise them alone in her daily struggle with time: dropping them off at school, catching the train so that she is not late to work, and returning in time to pick the children up from their nanny, who keeps them until late in the afternoon.
While the opening scenes show how she manages, with a thousand strains, to narrowly carry out the daily tasks of life, a railway strike dramatically worsens things. Living in a suburb to provide better conditions for her children, Julie is forced to constantly change buses and hitchhike to work, but to no avail. She is repeatedly late, eventually finding herself criticized and threatened by her boss. She is also late at night to pick up her children from the nanny, who in turn threatens to quit, as she can no longer stand the trouble. A delay in the alimony paid by her husband further worsens her finances and she receives warnings from the bank for delaying her monthly payment for a loan.
Julie is persistently trying to find a better job which both meets her previous work experience and will bring her a higher income. However, when she flees secretly from work to go to an interview, she comes into conflict with her boss, who upon learning of her absence threatens her with dismissal. After another late arrival the threat is realized and she is barred from entering the building. Fired, she finds herself at a complete impasse: her bank card is canceled and she is forced to leave things at the cash register in the supermarket, as she does not have enough money to pay. The search for a new job seemingly fails, as she receives no notice from her interviews. However, the situation is miraculously saved at the last minute, when she is finally offered a good position at another company.
The story may seem simple, but director Éric Gravel develops with such mastery the heroine’s stressful course towards a stalemate situation that the attention of the audience remains undiminished until the film’s conclusionary peak. Calamy’s excellent performance, which won an award at the Venice Film Festival, also contributes significantly to this engaging cinematic result. Not coincidentally, most French magazines and newspapers rated the film with 4 or 5 stars, with the sad exception of the conservative, far-right Le Figaro, which awarded it only one.
Full Time is quite reminiscent of the most recent, remarkable film by Ken Loach, Sorry We Missed You (2019). In that film, Ricky, a delivery man trying to get his own van, is overwhelmed by financial difficulties and harsh working conditions. However, the filmic atmosphere is somewhat different: while Loach’s hero aspires to become his own boss, an independent delivery man, Julie, despite her own aspirations for a better position, simply tries to keep her head above water. In this desperate endeavor she becomes a typical image of the average worker of our times, who often faces the exact same problems.
This element gives typicality to Full Time in the sense that the heroine reflects accurately the spirit and psychology of the working class. It thus rises to the status of an authentic film of social critique, which at a deeper level raises some important issues.
A first point concerns the attitude of the heroine, as well as the other maids in the hotel, toward both the railway strike and the demonstrations that are taking place in Paris. While news constantly comes up about clashes and riots in the city, it remains undiscussed between them. They do not express the slightest judgment about what is happening, let alone a willingness to join the movement, seeing a strike in the means of transport as simply another obstacle to their timely arrival at work. The heroine clearly expresses this attitude when she tells a neighbor who asks her opinion about the strikes: “I care mainly how I will avoid strikes and not how I will take part in them.”
A superficial analysis might describe this as a weakness of the film, a failure to show the subtle processes within the working class. But we think that Gravel rather shows here an artistic realism and a fidelity to the real situation. If the maids do not feel the strike as something that directly concerns them, this reflects the real mood at the present stage, when only a few groups of workers are participating in the movement, while the broad working class strata still adopt a passive stance. In several scenes we see how the maids are constantly experiencing the most severe pressures in order to fulfill their duties, leaving them very little time for any wider thinking.
A second point is connected with the element of “exaggeration” that could be attributed to the film. While the destructive rhythms of work and daily life sweep away growing sections of the working class, the heroine’s condition, a constant sprint without any rest, seems to be out of the ordinary. If, however, it does so, it is not in the sense of distorting the true social conditions, but of emphasizing and highlighting those threatening trends that are constantly gaining ground, especially after the 2007 crisis. That is why the film does not anywhere create a sense of unnaturalness; on the contrary, the average worker will surely discern their own experience in the fate of the heroine.
The critical status of the film becomes more debatable with its final scene, in which the heroine is saved from her desperate situation in a somewhat “Deus ex machina” way. While she believes that she has failed in her most recent interview, it turns out that the interviewer was merely absent for a few days on leave and, after returning, she contacts the heroine to offer her the desired position. Does this mean that Gravel resorts to an easy happy end, which undermines and nullifies the message of the film?
To raise the question more sharply, let us quote an assessment of the film’s social critique at katiousa.gr, a Greek Stalinist site whose columnists, even when they by way of exception say something valid, as is the case here, constantly miss the crucial points:
Eric Gravel comes to add his own voice through his heroine the wonderful Laure Calamy, to remind us once again that the whole system is wrong, that to run around in a wrong system is futile, that a human being cannot possibly live cut off from his/her social environment without class consciousness, without active participation in the struggles, because living like this, he/she will only be able to ‘fill’ his/her time with useless material, being cut off from the product of his/her work. But his/her life will remain empty.1
This is indeed the central idea of the film. But if the heroine finally manages to find an individual way out of her predicament, then doesn’t this undermine its crucial idea? Isn’t it like smuggling in the erroneous, adverse idea that if you work hard, you will eventually find something better and reach a kind of balance?
In our opinion, this is not the case. Julie is a head maid, with rich previous work experience and skills. She belongs to that “upper” part of the working class for which it may still be possible to find a solution on an individual level, as companies seek to hire such individuals. The fact that she manages to escape the impasse is thus a real possibility for her and her case is not generalized to a positive perspective for all workers; on the contrary, we see how a simple maid, after being fired from the hotel, is most likely condemned to certain unemployment.
The director, however, could have considered some other possible outcomes, which would perhaps more accurately portray the spirit of the present moment. If, for example, the heroine was left “hanging in the air,” waiting indefinitely for a notification from her interview, this would cover both possibilities; a last moment rescue or a final disaster (this kind of indefinite end appears, at a different level, in Boiling Point, a comparable 2021 film telling the story of a stressed Head Chef).2 Yet even so, the viewer can’t avoid being confronted with the question: if the heroine succeeds at the last moment, what will happen the next time she is fired?
Gravel himself summed it up in this way when he said: “I see it as an open ending and in my opinion, it’s not really a happy one. It may represent a relief, but it also raises a lot of new questions.”3
A number of other criticisms make valuable points, and it will be helpful to take a look at them, so as to get a deeper sense of the merits, as well as the small weaknesses, of Gravel’s remarkable film. For instance, Chr. Mitsis, after noting Gravel’s affinity with Ken Loach, praises the director’s ability to create a thriller-like, dystopic atmosphere with minimal means, in a realist, documentarist way:
Melodramatic coincidences and facilities are minimal, with the plot focused on a heroine in constant motion, who runs in a non-stop way to the… void. This modern urban truth is perfectly captured in a mise en scene with broken brakes and a feverish montage, which add to Julie’s desperate sprints the intensity of a well-tuned thriller. And while there are moments when suspense takes your breath away, the chaotic Paris (never depicted in general shots) looks like a post-apocalyptic metropolis of dystopian sci-fi. Despite the documentary authentic description of a collapsing world, however, Gravel ultimately remains –perhaps overly– optimistic and deeply humanistic.4
We would add two comments to this otherwise valid assessment. Firstly, Gravel’s film is not just about “alienating urban environments,” but about capitalism, large corporations, and the market. It is clearly the madness of this capitalist environment that permeates and directs the heroine’s stressful life. Gravel is definitely a humanist and an anti-capitalist as well. However, he and other like-minded directors, such as Radu Jude, have not yet attained a solid connection with popular movements, as is the case with older directors like Loach. In our opinion, it is this, itself obviously related to the present objective lack of rich popular movements to which older directors were able to refer, that accounts for an abstract element in their humanism and optimism.
Gr. Vasileiou, for his part, makes an interesting point, which resonates with Gravel’s own judgement, when he remarks that the film’s ending has a double-edged meaning, being perceived as salvation by the heroine but not by the viewer:
[The heroine’s] modern everyday Odyssey will end with a cunning finale, where the evolution of things shows differently in Julie’s eyes and differently through the director’s lens and through our own eyes, who all this time had been watching (too) the general picture.5
On the other hand, vilifications by reactionary critics sound more like praise for the film, revealing the causes of their anger. Here is what K. Kaimakis, a reviewer at “Athens Voice,” an aggressively right-wing Greek paper, has to say about Gravel’s film:
The award-winning performance of Laure Calamy (‘Call me my agent’) at [the] Venice Film Festival is the strongest element of a sham social melodrama that focuses on the heroine’s stressful attempt to carry it off in her life. The social environment and reality in Julie’s life are well designed but the problem in the film relates to the superficial sketching of her character, as many points in her behavior are exaggerated (the coarse grace she asks from the apprentice in the hotel, the lies she tells at work but also to her acquaintances, etc.), while even the issue of social movements that oppose the extension of working hours causing chaos in Paris is awfully, if not even inadvertently included in the plot.6
Kaimakis, it seems, has never noticed any person lying in this wonderful world around us. For example, when Putin presents his war in Ukraine as a liberating endeavor, this is not a lie designed to embellish Russian imperialism. And when the West presents itself as the worthy defender of democracy, there is no deception in this either. So, how indecent and “unnatural” for the heroine to be the only person in this world to lie, just in order to survive. Isn’t that melodramatic, a sentimental falsification of reality? And how inappropriate and dangerous indeed to bring in the social movements too? How much better would things be without them, if everyone was glorifying the market!
Arguing as a vulgar apologist of the system, Kaimakis reveals why people of his ilk dislike films like Full Time. They inwardly sense that the calamities the system inflicts on human lives approach a point that will make them intolerable, which hastens them to vilify beforehand social protest and anything inciting it. Their mockery of the film is, in fact, proof that Full Time hits its target.
How completely out of place criticisms like those of Kaimakis are is best summed up in a statement by Éric Gravel himself, who places his film in a wider frame: “Julie, the main character, lives life in the fast lane, not because she is a spy or a CIA agent but simply because she is a single mother fighting her way to a better life.”7 And F. Lemercier aptly sums up the social reality depicted in the film: “If you no longer want to clean rich people’s shit, there is no place for you here.”8
Gravel also stressed in an interview that his film is about the working class, whose conditions of life constantly deteriorate and, at the same time, comes to encompass ever larger numbers of people:
You could say that all that is related to the working segment is somehow an obsession for me. I am interested in the dynamics between humans and their work. My father, who struggled all his life as a labourer, was an important source of inspiration. I have the impression the middle class is getting smaller. That we have the bourgeoisie and then the poor, but in between, there aren’t many people left. Still the working class, where the majority of the people live, is not often represented at the cinema.9
Full Time is thus not only a caustic film about the inhuman face of capitalism but also a film that awakens its viewers by accurately portraying the real conditions of the working class.
- K. Vlachou, “‘Full time’ / Eric Gravel – No matter how much we ‘fill up’, life is elsewhere…”, http://www.katiousa.gr/politismos/kinimatografos/full-time-erik-gkravel-oso -kai-na-foularoume-i-zoi-einai-allou /.
- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11127680/.
- T. Vena, “Eric Gravel • Director of Full Time,” https://cineuropa.org/en/interview/410166/.
- Chr. Mitsis, Full Time, https://www.athinorama.gr/cinema/cinema-reviews/3004311/full-time/.
- Gr. Basileiou, Full Time, https://www.lifo.gr/guide/cinema/movies/full-time.
- “Review of Eric Gravel’s ‘Full Time’ (Á Plein Temps),” https://www.athensvoice.gr/culture/cinema/756128-kritiki-tainias-full-time-plein-temps.
- M. Granados, “Venice Film Festival 2021: ‘A Plein Temps’ Review (Orizzonti),” https://www.film-fest-report.com/home/biennale-venice-a-plein-temps-review.
- F. Lemercier, “Review: Full Time,” https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/409891/.
- Vena, https://cineuropa.org/en/interview/410166/.