Alan in Belfast: Full Time – spinning plates and adulting while the world is throwing the kitchen sink at you (Queen’s Film Theatre until 1 June)

You can feel the stress building as the techno music accentuates the raised heartbeat of Julie who is rushing around her home, following the daily ritual of getting herself and her two children dressed, fed and ready for school and work. Any interruption to the choreography and the whole dance could collapse.

Full Time/À plein temps follows a week in the life of Julie, a single mum who is head chambermaid in a very posh hotel that caters for demanding guests who will complain as quickly as they’ll leave a shocking mess to tidy up. She commutes in and out of Paris from a suburban village. A public transport strike, on top of a late alimony payment and needing to slip out of work for a job interview in her old more lucrative industry, stretches her nerves and her childcare beyond their limits.

An hour after the mid-morning screening, I’m eating my lunch and my stomach is still in knots. My own uncertainties about an event I’m filming tonight – still don’t know the precise venue so can’t be sure what kit to set out to pack into the car – are incomparable to the perpetual pressure Julie ploughs through each day.

Director and screenwriter Éric Gravel never falls back on playing Julie as a victim. Instead, Laure Calamy is free to depict a resilient woman of infinite resource, a finder of solutions (her method of offloading the trampoline out the back of a van is magical), someone who perseveres in the in the face of despair. Calamy’s performance is worth the cinema ticket. Yet she can only dig deep for so long before something breaks and her spinning plates come crashing to the floor?

There’s a whole genre of films that examine working conditions in less glamorous sectors in the labour market. Ken Loach would have made the film a gritty tear-jerker. Gravel settles for a warmer tone, emphasising the busyness and the movement rather than lingering shots of panic and despair.

A different movie would have brought a violent threat into the mix to bring the story to a dramatic climax. Yet Gravel finds more mundane alternatives to exacerbate the crisis, eventually offering a dim light at the end of fictional Julie’s tunnel that could dial down one stressor (finance) but won’t eliminate any of her other aggravations. One final line of dialogue – “Have a good day” – is offered with the best intentions but seems stupendously naïve knowing Julie’s circumstances.

By revolving the whole story around Julie, the backstory of everyone else on screen stays paper thin. A whole universe of spinoff movies could examine the levers and demands on Julie’s hotel boss, on her team of coworkers, on her children’s nanny, on her best friend and her estranged husband.

Sitting in the warm comfort of a cinema, Full Time may be feel like an extreme example of difficult adulting, but it’s probably a heavily sanitised version of many people’s real life experiences of precarious working and living without any safety nets.

Full Time is being screened in the Queen’s Film Theatre from Saturday 20 May to Thursday 1 June.