Anyone who has ever broken into a sweaty panicked run to make it in time for school pick-up will instantly get why the French Canadian director Eric Gravel has chosen to shoot this film about motherhood frazzle as a gripping thriller. I was on the edge of my seat in one scene, watching to see if a woman running to catch her commuter train home makes it. Her name is Julie, and she’s a divorced mum of two who’s feeling the grind: work, kids, mortgage arrears, crappy ex. It’s such an authentic and relatable film – so meticulously observed, in fact, that to be perfectly honest, I assumed it had been made by a woman.
Laure Calamy plays Julie; she’s in her early 40s, with a couple of children under eight. Every morning, Julie’s alarm clock goes off like a starting pistol. In the dark she walks her kids to the childminders, carrying her sleepy little boy. Then it’s a sprint from the suburbs into Paris where she works in a fancy hotel as head chambermaid. It’s a high-stress job. “The guests are demanding. They pay to be.” Then it’s back to the suburbs to pick up her kids in time for bed.
But this is the week when the wheels fall off. Because of a transport strike, trains leaving Paris get cancelled. Julie squeezes on to a bus that crawls out of the city. Her childminder has had enough and quits. To add to the complication, Julie has a job interview to squeeze in. Before the kids came along she worked in the corporate world; she’s got an MA in economics. But, like a lot of women, becoming a mum knocked her off the career ladder.
Calamy is utterly convincing, giving a performance that pulls us right into Julie’s inner world; a sigh here or droop of the shoulders there and you feel her sense that she’s not doing anything to the best of her ability. But make no mistake Julie is a warrior. Watch her assembling a trampoline in the dark, the night before her son’s birthday party. A more straightforward “issues” film might have thrown in a catastrophe, a cataclysmic moment when everything goes wrong. But Gravel’s script understands it doesn’t need fireworks. Everyday life is enough.
• Full Time is released on 26 May in UK cinemas.
