Full Time

Rebecca Varidel
15th Jul 2022

For all the women out there that are trying to combine full time work and family, this film is for you. Even more so if you are a single mum. I've been there and the things in this story are like walking into a brick relive it all wall. Yet, if you don't fall into any of these categories you will still love the film, I reckon.

Full Time (À Plein Temps) is a film about the reality of life and its everyday struggles. Struggles that are accentuated with the onset of a transport strike.

What I love most about this new Eric Gravel film is the seemingly simple story and timeline, a few life-changing days in the life of one person. Full Time is not only contemporary, it is relevant. And I've been banging on a bit about that lately. Truth, shed a tear with her at the end. I've been that tired. And I've been that resilient.

The marvellous Laure Calamy (Antoinette in the Cévennes) stars in Eric Gravel's heart-touching and award-winning new drama. Both won awards in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival for Full Time, best actress and the best director respectively.

Yes, Laure Calamy is brilliant, and real, capturing every nuance of the life of her role as Julie. She demonstrates humour love frustration perserverance joy and exasperation as true to that of any neighbour, colleague or friend. So real is she in the increasingly frenetic demands of work and home that I wanted to reach out somehow and help her. (Spoiler she managed without me.) Around her, Anna Suerez, Cyril Gueï, veteran Geneviève Mnich and Agathe Dronne deliver the goods.

Beyond these actors and their characters, Eric Gravel does an extraordinary job with the pace of the story which is cinema perfect. As is the cinematography with some amazing captures across diverse techniques. Adding to the capture is superb original sounds and music by Irène Drésel. All in all, a life and film that must be witnessed. It may be French but the story is international.

Full Time is a Palace Film opening in cinemas this month on 28 July.