Epilogue

Éric Gravel's À plein temps [Full time] (2021) is a film about exhaustion.It features a single mother, Julie, who lacks sufficient hours in the day to complete even the most basic tasks.She rises early in the morning to take her children to a local babysitter, an increasingly irritable retiree who no longer wants to continue in the role.Julie, just as the day is breaking, then boards a train to Paris to begin her work as a maid at a luxury hotel.She then wearily returns home, steeling herself to repeat the process the next day.Her life lurches from one crisis to another, with each ring of the phone bringing a new prob lem to overcome.Even buying a birthday pre sent for her son is an epic ordeal.The precarious balance of her life, however, is disrupted by two events: first, a job interview at a corporate firm for a professional post; and second, a strike that halts almost all public transportation in Paris.From this point on, Julie is constantly on the run, the jerking camera following her frenetic movement across the city against a backdrop of thumping electronic music.With public transportation suspended, she sprints through the streets to the interview, hoping to secure a better future for herself and her children.À plein temps pre sents two solutions to con temporary feelings of stress: one is collective, in the form of the mass action of the transport workers, who are also suffering from overwork, and the other is individual, in the form of Julie's attempt to rise out of the working class.Ultimately, it is the latter option that