It is always a delight to see the talented and charismatic Adèle Exarchopoulos at the Cannes Film Festival. She made history in 2013 by jointly winning the Palme d'Or for Blue Is the Warmest Colour, sharing the prestigious award with director Abdellatif Kechiche and co-star Léa Seydoux. In Jeanne Herry's new film Garance, Exarchopoulos plays an actress grappling with alcohol addiction. While she delivers some genuinely compelling moments, particularly when portraying her character's boisterous stage performances for schoolchildren, the film overall is a glib and unsatisfying drama. Its fundamental naivety becomes glaringly apparent when the protagonist is forced to confront her life's crisis.
A Promising Setup Falls Short
Exarchopoulos portrays Garance, a young actress who idolizes Arletty's character of the same name from Marcel Carné's classic film Les Enfants du Paradis. She works as an assistant stage manager in a prestigious Parisian repertory company, believing she is on the verge of securing significant speaking roles in the upcoming season. However, she is instead relegated to the touring schools company, where her undeniable talents are undermined by her nightly heavy drinking and subsequent hangovers. Garance is the type of person who arrives chaotically late to meetings, offering dramatic excuses about delayed buses and trains. Predictably, she is fired from the theatre troupe, a dismissal made worse by being executed collectively with a stern directive to seek help, reminiscent of an intervention.
Relationships and Health Crises
She enters a new relationship with set designer Pauline (Sara Giraudeau), but her drinking puts strain on the partnership. Garance begins to suffer from anxiety attacks and depression. To compound her troubles, her pregnant sister—who serves as the voice of common sense—is diagnosed with cancer. This contrived health crisis seems designed solely to facilitate Garance's path to maturity, rather than arising organically from the narrative.
An Implausible Portrayal of Addiction
The film's flimsiness is most evident when Garance is forced to confront her life choices by a doctor. The physician expresses astonishment at how well Garance looks for someone supposedly consuming litres of white wine daily. Indeed, she appears as a well-groomed movie star, not someone battling severe alcoholism. When she finally admits she needs to quit because her liver is failing, there are tearful scenes where she expresses fear, yet she simply stops drinking without attending Alcoholics Anonymous. The process does not appear difficult for her. This suggests she is what AA veterans would call a "dry drunk" or a "white knuckle drunk"—someone who believes they can overcome addiction alone. The film seems to imply that recovery can be achieved as fancifully as Garance manages it, offering a superficial and unrealistic portrait of alcoholism.
Garance screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
