Eric Gravel’s 2021 film Full-Time (À Plein Temps) opens in what feels like silence. Alongside a shot of a woman asleep in bed, in predawn gloom, the faint sound of shallow breathing is heard. A digital triplet pulse alarm triggers her eyes to slowly open. On cue, a soft synthesizer taps out a faux analogue tattoo. Thus starts Irène Drésel’s score. Her down-filtered bell-tone pulse continues over a low key montage: single mum Julie (Laure Calamy) getting her two young children ready for school in predawn darkness. Drésel’s tone continues, changing little: it is as fixed as Julie is focussed. It lays low in the mix, but it is always present, always felt.

The score widens its palette as Julie drops her children off to a neighbour nanny who looks after them before and after school. Residing in the village of Collemiers, Julie must travel around three hours to Paris, where she works as a head chambermaid in a luxury hotel. Foreboding chords emerge from the music’s clockwork ticking as she runs to catch her train. Cramped and numbed en route, she remains lost in thought, gazing at the endless commercial, industrial and domestic terrains viewed through the condensation smeared windows as the sun rises. Julie runs this daily gauntlet of French public transit in the midst of ongoing strikes.

Confrontations between the nation’s working classes and the profiteering corporate class constitutes an unending source of tension for Julie. The fear of being late to work threatens her five days a week – as does her rush to collect her children from her neighbour at the end of the day. The score’s incessant drive spins like a perpetual motion mechanism, symbolising capitalism’s need to keep its machinery moving.

Mother; carer; cook; cleaner; chauffeur; commuter; worker; manager. Julie’s identity is forced into a composite of looping tasks, mirrored responsibilities and uncompensated deliveries. Drésel’s score refutes emotional development or psychic progress, and instead enforces Julie’s gridlocked status as a working mother whose job impedes her motherly performance. The film’s narrative follows Julie’s pursuit to simply finish her day’s commitments domestically and professionally. Trapped in a cycle of precarity, her hamster-wheel momentum is unstoppable: the music articulates this through its avoidance of any heroic journey, harmonic closure, or transcendent release.

Full-Time is absent of any major male characters. When men appear, they are invisible, manipulatable or ignorable. At work, Julie is ensconced among women: a dozen maids all under her supervision, plus a middle-management superior to Julie. The (supposedly) male management of the hotel are never seen. Dancing this gendered tightrope, Julie is there to support her female colleagues, but her employment security puts her more on an aspirational path than one of solidarity with her workers. Laure Calamy’s performance presents Julie as charming but desperate; empathic but survivalist. This foments an attitude that is severely pragmatic and that has little time for romanticised ideas about empowerment. With strange resonance, Irène Drésel’s score embodies these conflicting traits: her synthesized passages – let’s call them ‘pastorales of employment’ – are flowery, Beaux-Arts brocades of time-clocked pulsing and responsive dial massaging, yet they remain synched to Julie’s ensnarement by her economic circumstances.

This is not to accuse Drésel’s music of conservative beautification and tizzying cosmetics. While her releases of perfumed techno are a hybrid of psy-trance swirls, fizzing filters and Clicks & Cuts-style beat abstraction, her work is no more nor less Romantic than just about anyone working in the live retro-techno continuum. But when ported as a film score to Full-Time, these warbling frills and spinning tutus of user-friendly flights of fancy in the MIDI realm are freighted with the real world conditions of base level employment. The last thing in Julie’s mind as she rushes from A to B and back again is Pre-Raphaelite muses, fin de siècle ingenues, or Monet’s Water Lilies (1918) installation at Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris (visual associations evoked by Drésel’s persona and public performances).

It is this consistent contradiction – of beauty undermined by maintenance, of aesthetics problematised by the reality of existence – that keeps the score so vivid and life-affirming throughout Full-Time. Train replacement connections, unavoidable extra duties, unexpected work interruptions, last minute plan changes: these require ongoing flexibility within a working context that allows zero space for compensation or consideration. Julie is continually impacted by these devastating shifts. As the tension rises, a swelling chordal hum often overtakes the synth pulsing, as if the music has become engorged by internal pressure, building up like water on the brain as Julie rushes from place to place. The synthesizer arpeggiators tonally thicken as the upper frequencies are dialled up, increasing sharpness of tone and ringing sustain to bleed into a de-rhythmicised wash – almost as if the music cannot restrain itself. Full-Time might seem like Tom Tykwer’s trance-pumping Run, Lola, Run (1998) but it’s really a variation on the desperation at the core of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Rosetta (1999).

Drésel’s music is about Julie’s agitation and anxiety, but it is equally about the forces around her that create her situation. The narrative alternates between a docu-style realism of showing her socioeconomic conditions, and passages where she navigates her primary source of conflict: being in the wrong place at the wrong time, with not enough time to correct this spatio-temporal situation. The musical moments grow, peak and reduce according to this dynamic. The score is always fragmentary and episodic; silence in the music track is merely the period before the ticking pulse is activated once more, as Julie’s tasks are cyclical, repetitive, unresolved and ultimately incapable of changing her situation or empowering her. (The album release’s track titles read like an enforced schedule: “Monday Morning” (“Lundi matin”) through the days of the week to “Next Monday Morning” (“Encore lundi matin”).

A French cultural context qualifies and illuminates Drésel’s contribution to Full-Time. The free party movement, which spread in the UK through the likes of Spiral Tribe in the early 1990s, inspired anarchist party promoters in France to create events in illicit, underground, alternative spaces and environments. A sub genre associated with this epoch – freetekno – is fast and rushing, highly compressed, released and exchanged mostly through cassette releases at the time. A surfeit of nostalgic reflections by once banging boys continues to this day to paint the freetekno era as a republic of political resistance through the empowerment of partying. This is not the place to debate the wild abandon, youthful hopefulness and communal celebration which fuelled the originating freetekno scene. But if nighttime partying is so important to one’s soul and spirit, where does that leave one’s relation to one’s day job? What exactly is the numbing reality of dealing with the economy of one’s own living situation? And what happens to all that once one starts a family? Can a person ever be ‘free’ from work?

One can even imagine Julie’s contemporary predicament to be the type of nightmare workload that would send one desperately scurrying to a rural field or deep catacomb to escape the oppressive realities of existence. Yet here we are, 30 years post-freetekno, with Irène Drésel’s score. And as perfect a fit as it is for Full-Time’s complex critique of how a woman looks after her family while working within the debilitating neo-globalist purchase of luxury leisure, does not Drésel’s use of Ableton Live mark her as a ‘creative’ node spinning in her own aesthetic hamster-wheel of production?

Drésel’s musical stylistics can be audited as a pull-down menu option of techno sheen applied to the dirty mixtapes of French freetekno collectives like Heretik. This is in marked contrast to the flesh-cog reality of service industry workers whose spent bodies are drained of fuel for industries focussed on pleasure delivery. Thus, the audiovision of Full-Time – how its score interpolates its narrative – lays bare the contradictions of current economic conditions. Put another way: listening to a late 1990s Heretik mixtape and its crunched, hardtek machismo bleating, one can vicariously imagine the worst of worlds hammering one’s aural consciousness: you are a woman. With two children. Working full-time in a luxury hotel. And full-time at home. Three hours there. And three hours back. Monday to Friday. Forever.

Wire subscribers can read Philip Brophy’s original Secret History of Film Music columns online in the digital archive. Previous instalments of this column published on The Wire website can be found here.