Anyone who has ever damaged right into a sweaty panicked run to make it in time for varsity pick-up will immediately get why the French Canadian director Eric Gravel has chosen to shoot this movie about motherhood frazzle as a gripping thriller. I used to be on the sting of my seat in a single scene, watching to see if a girl operating to catch her commuter prepare residence makes it. Her identify is Julie, and she or he’s a divorced mum of two who’s feeling the grind: work, children, mortgage arrears, crappy ex. It’s such an genuine and relatable movie – so meticulously noticed, actually, that to be completely sincere, I assumed it had been made by a girl.
Laure Calamy performs Julie; she’s in her early 40s, with a few youngsters below eight. Each morning, Julie’s alarm clock goes off like a beginning pistol. At the hours of darkness she walks her children to the childminders, carrying her sleepy little boy. Then it’s a dash from the suburbs into Paris the place she works in a elaborate lodge as head chambermaid. It’s a high-stress job. “The friends are demanding. They pay to be.” Then it’s again to the suburbs to choose up her children in time for mattress.
However that is the week when the wheels fall off. Due to a transport strike, trains leaving Paris get cancelled. Julie squeezes on to a bus that crawls out of the town. Her childminder has had sufficient and quits. So as to add to the complication, Julie has a job interview to squeeze in. Earlier than the children got here alongside she labored within the company world; she’s received an MA in economics. However, like quite a lot of ladies, turning into a mum knocked her off the profession ladder.
Calamy is completely convincing, giving a efficiency that pulls us proper into Julie’s interior world; a sigh right here or droop of the shoulders there and you are feeling her sense that she’s not doing something to the perfect of her means. However make no mistake Julie is a warrior. Watch her assembling a trampoline at nighttime, the night time earlier than her son’s party. A extra easy “points” movie might need thrown in a disaster, a cataclysmic second when every part goes improper. However Gravel’s script understands it doesn’t want fireworks. On a regular basis life is sufficient.
