The latest feature by actress turned director Jeanne Herry ('All Your Faces') chronicles a struggling thespian who can’t put down the bottle long enough to sustain a job.
As an actress herself, not to mention the daughter of French movie star Miou-Miou, writer-director Jeanne Herry knows a thing about performance. Her last two features,were both ensemble pieces featuring star-studded casts doing solid work across the board in films that favored characters and emotions over plot.as a functioning alcoholic who’s also a working actress — or at least an actress looking for work when she’s not too plastered.
Already crowned with a César award for, she winningly plays a woman who can’t kick a habit that may prematurely send her to the grave. Nor does she seem to want to. But there’s also a limit to Herry’s latest performance piece, which feels too sketchy and loose-limbed to sustain our attention, or else relies too much on histrionics to do so.
More chronicle than drama, it sticks faithfully by the side of its lovable mess of a heroine, whom Exarchopoulos plays with her usual no-bullshit funkiness, this time with too many glasses of wine down the hatch. She brings a dose of humor and a few grace notes to a movie in search of a tighter story, even if it deserves credit for its honesty..
In some ways, Herry’s feature is an attempt to combine the two, capturing its titular heroine’s dual plight as both an out-of-control drinker and a gifted performer who loves the spotlight. But it’s tough to make it as an actress — “hard hard hard! ” a teary-eyed Garance confesses to a class of grade schoolers in one funny scene — especially when you start slurring your lines or showing up late to rehearsal.
This happens at increasing intervals as we watch Garance trying to hang on with bit parts in artsy plays or leading roles in a traveling kids’ theatre, giving her all but also slipping up whenever she’s too hungover. Her fellow thespians eventually confront her about the drinking, but Garance doesn’t want to hear it.
Any good actor will tell you it’s not easy to convincingly play a drunk person, but Exarchopoulos not only does that extremely well here — she plays one who keeps claiming being drunk isn’t a problem, even if deep down she knows it is. The film focuses on Garance’s mixed bag of emotions as she wards off her inner demons by being inebriated most of the time.
She survives a few failed love affairs, one with a shiftless film director who spends his days glued to their couch, the other with a lesbian writer who opens her up sexually in a relationship that’s both passionate and short-lived. She also maintains steady friendships that mostly involve going out to clubs and binge-drinking to oblivion.
Garance is too much of a party girl to ever settle down, getting so sauced that she barely makes it home each night in one piece — and never with her stockings intact. That routine changes, though not completely, when she meets Pauline , a wholesome theater scenographer who’s every bit her opposite but is also willing to put up with her antics.
Much of the film’s second half tracks their burgeoning romance through thick and thin, including the COVID lockdown and many more hangovers, until Garance nearly gets wasted to the point of no return. The story of a functioning alcoholic is perhaps repetitive by nature — another day, another two liters of white wine in this case — but that doesn’t always make it interesting to watch.
To reinforce the drama, Herry adds a weepy subplot involving Garance’s younger sister, Charlotte , a breast cancer survivor who tragically gets diagnosed with leukemia before giving birth to her second child.are the ones that come across as messy and real — a blend that is more or less Exarchopoulos’ specialty. Herry tries too hard to stir us at times, even if she manages to undercut the drama with some genuine laughs. But her film teeters uneasily between a wavering narrative and belabored stabs at melodrama, never quite finding its footing.isn’t occasionally moving, especially during a closing section that has Garance finally cleaning up her act with the help of a straight-talking addictologist .
At that point her appearance begins to shift and the hardened look Exarchopoulos has worn throughout most of the movie starts to melt away, albeit with a little more suffering to come. But it’s lovely to finally see Garance cracking a smile not because she’s just downed another glass, but because she hasn’t.
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