Director: Eric Gravel (France). Year of Release: 2021
Silly o’clock. A village on the outskirts of Paris. Julie’s alarm goes off, and she tries to get her kids fed and out of the house. She’d get them washed as well, but the boiler’s broken. She takes them to a woman in the village who’ll look after them during the day when Julie is at work. Having deposited the kids, Julie rushes to the station but it’s not as easy as that. There’s a strike on, and most trains aren’t running. Julie squeezes herself into the replacement bus service.
Julie uses her pass card to enter a large door and slips on her maid’s uniform. This is a 5 star hotel, the sort of place where petty guests hide rubbish so they can complain to the management and call out the maids. Julie is the head of her shift which puts her between her supervisor, who calls her into the office for some harsh words, and the other maids who she is able to cajole and sometimes even blackmail to do favours for her.
The film takes Julie through various circles of hell as she struggles to balance her work, family and ambitions to better herself. A particular low point is when she is called in to clean out a room of a Scottish singer who has subjected it to the full “Bobby Sands treatment” (hint to latecomers: Bobby Sands was one of the IRA Hunger Strikers who, when they were forced to wear uniforms, took part in the “dirty protest” where they smeared their own shit against their cell walls).
As Julie’s bills pile up and cash machines start refusing her credit card, she frantically rings her ex-husband who refuses to answer her calls. When he finally leaves a message on her answer phone, he gaslights her saying sorry, he’s been out of the country with bad phone reception, while omitting any reference to the alimony payments which he’s failed to make and could be what enables Julie to survive for another week.
While all this is happening, we hear a pulsating score reminiscent of all those soundtracks way back when by Tangerine Dream. Everything is happening at a speed with which Julie is unable to cope. She must rush to the last available train, or stay in a hotel in Paris where dubious men offer her a place in their bed, or hitch-hike across town. Every commonplace action is unnecessarily complicated, partly just because Julie has to worry about her lack of money and the kids at home.
Nonetheless, you find yourself (or at least I did) asking what is the point of the film? What is it trying to tell us? On the one hand it is clearly showing us that the life of a single mother is full of complications and stress which don’t even occur to many better off people. All power to its elbow on that point. But it often doesn’t seem to be about single mothers, but about this particular single mother, who we are allowed to feel sorry for as she is only temporarily slumming it.
The film follows a recent trend of showing how difficult working life for women who are not at the bottom of the social pile – indeed they are able to exert power over women lower down the food chain. Defenders of this practise will say that this is because the films are depicting flawed 3-dimensional characters. I rather fear that something else is in play. We can feel for Julie because she is “deserving” poor, unlike the work-shy layabouts at the bottom of the pile.
I mean, Julie isn’t even supposed to be a chambermaid. She studied marketing, giving up a promising career to stay at home with her children. Much of the film shows her working out how she can skip work to get to an interview at a bigshot company (Julie’s previous work for a critical NGO is definitely a mark against her here). While this does show indignities to which no-one should be subjected, it also sets Julie up as someone who is more deserving of our sympathy.
Julie is portrayed as an atomised individual, not part of any social collective. This might make us feel sorry or even pity for her, but it also isolates her from. It also makes her able to inflict her own injustice. When she pressurizes a new maid to clock out for her, the maid – a young single mother – is summarily sacked, You can blame Julie’s boss who does the actual sacking, but Julie is not entirely free of guilt for putting the young woman in an impossible situation.
In one scene, as we see smoke issuing out of the banlieux, we question Julie’s relative privilege. But this is a film which finds it difficult to conceive of collective resistance. Critics have noted that it is interesting that Julie is unable to show any solidarity for the striking rail workers because she’s too busy concentrating on keeping her head above water. But this “interesting” fact is an editorial choice. This is a film which has made the conscious decision not to show any solidarity.
What we see instead is what Germans call “Entsolidarisierung” – best translated as something like the withdrawal of solidarity. Julie never says that she doesn’t support the strikes, indeed when someone offers her a lift and says he’s on his way to a demo, she sort of nods in approval. But because we see the film almost entirely through Julie’s eyes, we only see the strikes through the prism of how they make her life impossible, not in how a win for our side could also benefit her.
It is also not a film which contains much fun. Some critics (generally those who haven’t seen much of their work) accuse film makers like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh of making bleak films which are devoid of entertainment. But what categorises most Loach and Leigh films is just how many jokes there are. In contrast, Julie – Eine Frau gibt nicht auf is almost incessantly grim. There are no moments of levity to allow us a sigh of relief. It is an ordeal to sit through all the misery.
I think that this makes the happy ending tacked on the end all the more dissatisfying. It is as if the film has decided to show us just how bad life is for many women workers, before shying away from the logical conclusion. In the last moment, it offers hope after promising none. This somehow just feels inauthentic, as if the film does not have the courage of its convictions. Real life does not get better on the whim of a writer who does not want us to leave the cinema feeling miserable.
There is much in this film to like. In case those sound like weasel words, I’ll rephrase – there is much of the film which I do like. But there is something about its failure to commit, its insistence on treating the transport strike as a background inconvenience which just rankles. This is a film which tries to comment on Big Social Problems by concentrating on an individual. It does this ok, but in choosing this way of working it loses much of the power which it could have had.
Ok, but could have been much better.
CinePhil 