“Succeeds as a portrait of alcoholism and the way those who suffer from it can more or less function normally, but it is mostly an acting vehicle for Exarchopoulos’ considerable talent”

La vie d’une femme alcoolique

It starts wtih just a glass of wine. This is France, wine is ubiquitous. Everybody does it. But one glass becomes a few, and soon a few every day. And then, well, you’re an alcoholic. For Garance (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a glass of white to take the edge of and chase her anxieties away gradually becomes a problem. An actress in her mid-thirties, the first sign that something is off is when the director of her theater troupe doesn’t offer her a role in the new play he’s staging. She is ‘relegated’ to the kids’ shows. The drinking goes from bad to worse, and she starts to slip up more. She is kicked off the troupe altogether. She wakes up in a bus depot with her panties halfway down her legs, not knowing why, how, and who. But then she meets Pauline (Sara Giraudeau), a scenographer, and finds the love of her life. Garance doesn’t have much experience with women, declares herself ‘mostly not a dyke’ in an earlier encounter with a woman, but throws herself into an affair with Pauline with abandon. Into the wine as well, and with COVID and lockdowns the drinking only gets worse. Her sister, bald and isolated because of her leukemia treatment, talks Garance into kicking the habit, and with all her willpower and Pauline’s support she manages to go sober. But the temptation will always remain.

Even though Garance (Another Day) is a fairly straightforward character study of a functioning alcoholic, French director Jeanne Herry’s fourth feature, which Herry penned herself, distinguishes itself from most other films in the ‘addiction’ genre by not falling into clichés. Although we do see Garance come home almost blacked out after an all-night bender, or with a giant hangover the day after, for most of the film the character shows that alcoholism doesn’t prevent someone from functioning reasonably well, at least for a while. The spiral down is slow, and it takes some time for people to notice something is off. This is also because Herry is patient with introducing Garance’s excessive drinking behavior. The first time we see her take a sip is during a break in the preparations for a stage performance. As said, this doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. Slowly but surely the glasses start making it into the frame, and you start noticing Garance always has one in front of her, while others resort to coffee. It’s this sort of subtlety in direction and mise-en-scène that shows Herry’s talent, and makes the obvious flaws in the screenplay (the repetitiveness, the reluctance to go any deeper into the reasons for Garance’s drinking problem than ‘mental health issues’) a little easier to forgive.

Another reason for forgiveness is Exarchopoulos’ brilliant performance as a woman who for the longest time denies she has a problem, because, sure, she has some mishaps and has to increasingly come up with excuses as to why she is late or lost her keys, but she’s still able to do her job, isn’t she? Except at some point Garance just no longer can be counted on, and when this starts to dawn on her Exarchopoulos is at her best. In a field already overflowing with contenders, the Palme d’Or laureate for 2013’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour might just add a Cannes Best Actress award to her name. Opposite her, Giraudeau does a fabulous job as the calm in the eye of the storm that is her on-screen partner, while Mathilde Roehrich nails her most emotional scenes, in which she has to confront her sister with the truth from her own sickbed. Ultimately, Garance succeeds as a portrait of alcoholism and the way those who suffer from it can more or less function normally, but it is mostly an acting vehicle for Exarchopoulos’ considerable talent. Hopefully Herry can take some more risks in her next attempt, and move away from this sort of sober (pun intended) melodrama with which the French cinema landscape is already inundated. The directing talent is certainly there, and with the right cast she is capable of something better and more ambituous than Garance, despite the film’s relative strengths.