Garance (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is her name, and she’s proud of it: of being a feminist, a liberated woman, of having caring friends, loving family, and the most affectionate partner in the whole world. What she’s not pleased about is her past. Garance is an alcoholic now cultivating the not-so-obvious art of abstinence. It took her a while to clear body and mind from the addiction constantly whispering in her ears. What’s the story behind her miraculous recovery? Exarchopoulos is right here to tell you about it (both offscreen and on), as the bulk of Another Day (Garance in French) is a massive––and overly extended––flashback.
Jeanne Herry’s drama, part of Cannes’ main competition, feels like something you might have seen, but don’t know when, why, or if. Yet Another Day is more ambitious than it initially appears to be, providing an insightful (if repetitive) perspective on alcoholism and the woman’s angst in modern France. With some sense of Garance’s ingrained sassiness, Herry depicts the life of millennials through the prism of their loves, anxieties, and personal troubles.
Perhaps it’s an open secret, the world’s oldest mystery, but it’s still true: there is a thick line between alcoholism and somewhat deliberate drinking. In the first ten minutes, we already see Garance with three glasses of white and, step by step, she enters the loop of never-ending drinking. Everyone is aware of this drunk elephant in the room, whereas our protagonist is already on the ship called “SS Denial,” pretending she is always ready to stop. However, nothing is surprising about her continuous need for one more drink.
As a struggling (although talented) actress, Garance lets off steam by partying, per the Beatles, eight days a week. She enters the bars even on Sundays, drinks shots to Phoenix and Blur playing in the background, and then falls asleep on a bus while coming back home. The pressure is always there, one concern appearing after another. Her sister is in remission, the bills won’t pay themselves, and being in a theater company performing for kids seems like the opposite of what she has always dreamed. “I’m proud to be working here,” Garance confides to her boss, even though she’s aware of this white lie. To quote Springsteen: people always find some reason to believe. Everyone needs one, and so does Garance.
Exarchopoulos’ heroine dismisses other people’s support almost with a fury. When the anger is boiling right inside of her, she needs some liquid to soothe it a little bit. “I have everything under control,” she repeats all over again. Has she, really? When she pours herself a glass of wine before noon, it is no longer a problem; instead she becomes one. Only when she meets Pauline (Sarah Giraudeau) and receives a horrifying diagnosis will Garance have to choose. It’s either her life or drinking. Both options seem plausible.
In recognizing one’s immaculate skills of pretending to act if intoxicated, film scholars often point to the “drunkish” tour de force from Jimmy Stewart in George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story. In a performance that nears that stunning high bar, Exarchopoulos strongly relies on the script, which encourages her to loosen her body a little bit, raise her voice when it’s inappropriate for Garance, and carefully approach the sensitive theme of her heroine’s uncontrolled hysteria, also related to the unhealthy penchant for wine. As always, she remains a force of nature, a powerhouse full of contradictions. It’s not pleasurable to watch Garance get drunk and potentially waste her entire life, yet the way Exarchopoulos imitates both drunkenness and the act of alcohol withdrawal, full of reappearing panic attacks, rings hypnotic.
Exarchopoulos makes Another Day something more than a French soap opera, which the film often structurally resembles. Garance’s life consists of more downs than ups, but at least she’s a reliable narrator, no longer scared to admit her past mistakes. Even during rather mundanely scripted passages, Another Day gets a visceral portrayal of a young alcoholic’s struggle right. Without Exarchopoulos, that would not have been the case. She has the kind of old-school star charisma to bring life to narrative tedium.
Another Day premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.