Another Day

“Acting is great, being an actress is hard,” Garance (Adèle Exarchopoulos) shares with a class of children on career day. The 36-year-old woman truly blossoms when she is on stage, but continually finds herself playing secondary characters, spends more time helping the leads get into costume than she does in the spotlight.

As the feature prompts careful observation of events in her daily life, gradual comprehension of why the theatre troupe is hesitant to grant her more responsibility emerges. Garance refers to herself as an alcoholic so casually, even the viewer first mistakes it for humour. Drinking seems like an integral part of this lifestyle, inseparable from both artistic identity and French culture. But Garance can’t get through a single day without imbuing. Despite being highly functional, the inebriety is starting to impact both her reliability and her health.

Director Jeanne Herry forgoes any clichés in depicting addictive behaviour or over-digesting material. She introduces the protagonist, then allows the spectator to sit with her, as if they were part of her circle of friends. Through this relationship, the film re-creates the slow, organic unfolding of human familiarity, and a gradual deepening of understanding.

This speaks to the filmmaker’s trust in the audience as well as her headliner. Exarchopoulos plays Garance with a striking receptiveness, a friendly exuberance one could mistake for opportunism were it not so present in every single one of her interactions with others. But her fundamental desire to connect is genuine, and effortlessly establishes the emotional stakes for the viewers, who root for her implicitly.

Rejecting didactics of the conventional issue-driven drama, Garance is instead a brilliant character study, offering unadorned insight into self-destructive behaviours. Exarchopoulos’s performance is poignant and raw, captivating and devastating. As the feature proverbially places all of its eggs in her basket, the audience’s willingness to emotionally invest in her journey is crucial. The repetitive rhythms of addiction are difficult to portray authentically without transferring some of that exhaustion onto the screen, and Garance‘s measured rhythm may test viewers impatient with quieter forms of storytelling.