Full Time review – school-run thriller turns into high-stakes motherhood drama

Laure Calamy plays a woman forever racing between maternal and work duties in an acutely relatable story that grips

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.

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