Jeanne Herry's drama following a young actress over eight years as alcoholism reshapes her work, relationships, friendships and sense of self.
Garance is not introduced as a celebrity or as someone whose life has already collapsed. She works, moves apartments, falls in love, goes out and keeps functioning. Alcohol is simply always there — first as comfort and social fuel, then increasingly as something that reorganizes the rest of her life. Jeanne Herry follows that process across eight years in Garance.
Garance is less sensational than its subject might suggest, and that is often its greatest strength. Jeanne Herry depicts addiction through ordinary gestures, lateness, parties, memory gaps and relationships slowly bending out of shape. Adèle Exarchopoulos is excellent because she never reduces Garance to her illness, while Sara Giraudeau provides a gentleness that never becomes passivity. The film is less convincing when it arranges the path toward recovery too neatly or uses family drama as narrative acceleration. Yet its rhythm, performances and refusal of misery-driven spectacle create a portrait lively enough to survive the screenplay's simplifications.
