The glass never arrives alone

Garance begins with a less spectacular idea than its subject might suggest: show alcoholism before a person's life resembles the image cinema usually assigns to an alcoholic.

Garance works. She acts. She records voice work. She moves apartments. She parties. She falls in love. She looks after her sister. She is sometimes late and usually has an explanation plausible enough to postpone the moment when other people — and especially Garance herself — have to name what is happening.

Jeanne Herry stretches that movement across eight years. The span allows drinking to change function without providing a neat dividing line. Alcohol first belongs to social life, then to the end of the day, then to difficult moments, then increasingly to almost every moment.

That gradual shift is more persuasive than the film's explicitly dramatic passages.

Adèle Exarchopoulos refuses the grand performance

The role could easily have become an acting showcase: stagger more dramatically, shout louder, visibly deteriorate and eventually deliver one enormous recovery scene designed for awards-season clips.

Exarchopoulos works elsewhere.

Her Garance has the particular social energy of someone capable of presenting chaos as spontaneity. She is funny, appealing, irritating and functional enough for dependency to remain hidden behind personality for a long time.

Some of the strongest moments are tiny. A tired change in her voice. Waking up and reconstructing the previous evening. An excuse produced almost automatically. Continuing to joke when a situation stopped being funny some time ago.

Exarchopoulos does not ask us to watch a performance about alcoholism. She builds a person who also happens to be alcoholic.

The theatre keeps Garance from becoming a case study

Garance is an actress, and Herry knows that environment well enough for rehearsals, minor roles, touring work and professional frustration to feel like more than decoration.

The movie becomes especially alive when Garance is working.

Scenes in which she performs for children immediately establish what alcohol threatens to destroy. She has talent, instinct and the ability to create a reaction in a room regardless of whether the professional establishment considers her important.

That distinction matters. Garance is not a simple story about an artist drinking because she has failed. She can be talented, loved and desired and still continue drinking. Addiction does not solve into one psychological equation.

Herry's approach also reflects her research. The director has explained that the screenplay drew on interviews with a young alcoholic describing her path toward recovery while Herry also incorporated knowledge from her own earlier life as an actress.

Editing communicates time better than exposition

Laurence Briaud carries an essential part of the film.

Garance crosses eight years without turning every stage into an announced chapter. The film jumps, accelerates, resumes situations later and leaves the audience to measure what has shifted.

The fragmentation suits the protagonist's perception. Life seems to rush forward even as she repeatedly returns to familiar patterns: a new home, another job, another party, another hangover, another conviction that she remains sufficiently in control.

Screen Daily has notably praised this rhythmic construction. A large amount happens, but not every incident is artificially framed as a decisive turning point.

Dependency is built through repetition.

Sara Giraudeau changes the film's temperature

Pauline could easily have become a dangerous kind of character: the perfect partner whose love mechanically cures Garance.

Sara Giraudeau largely prevents that.

Pauline is calmer, steadier and less spectacular than Garance, but she is not a narrative nurse. Giraudeau gradually reveals the limit of what affection can absorb.

The physical and vocal contrast between the actresses creates an immediately readable dynamic without making the relationship feel engineered to prove a thesis.

One woman fills the room; the other initially seems willing to give her that space. Eventually, the arrangement becomes impossible to sustain.

Love helps, but it cannot be enough

The screenplay also becomes slightly too neat around this relationship.

Garance's romantic and sexual evolution provides some of the film's gentlest material. It also creates a risk: turning emotional stability into a shortcut that gradually makes dependency solvable.

Herry tries to resist that simplification. Pauline cannot decide on Garance's behalf, nor can a different domestic life automatically remove alcohol.

Yet the overall structure places love, realization and recovery close enough together for some critics to find the trajectory too easy or insufficiently representative of addiction's complexity.

That is a legitimate weakness, particularly toward the final stages.

A sister and a brutal reminder of time

Garance's relationship with her younger sister Judith brings a different urgency into the story.

Sarajeanne Drillaud plays a character whose illness forces Garance to confront exactly what her habits help her avoid: time can run out.

These scenes carry obvious emotional force and give Exarchopoulos a different register from parties, work and romance.

They also expose the screenplay's machinery.

When external crises align too neatly with the moment Garance needs to understand her own condition, the film edges toward more conventional dramatic construction than its everyday observation initially promises.

The Guardian was particularly critical of this tendency to use family developments as mechanisms for realization. The objection has merit: Garance is stronger when it observes than when it arranges.

The direction trusts performers more than images

After In Safe Hands and All Your Faces, Jeanne Herry remains primarily a filmmaker of groups, speech and faces.

Garance changes scale by concentrating on one protagonist, but the camera retains that willingness to let actors generate the emotional movement.

Antoine Cormier photographs the story without turning alcoholism into a visual spectacle. Garance's decline is not automatically accompanied by dirtier colors, broken framing or suddenly hysterical camerawork.

That restraint avoids many clichés.

It also explains part of the critical resistance. Compared with the density of Exarchopoulos's performance, the visual language can appear relatively discreet. The movie demonstrates more intelligence through behavior and editing than through an aggressively distinctive visual style.

The comedy does not disappear when things become serious

One of Herry's more interesting decisions is allowing Garance to remain funny.

Dependency does not instantly convert a person into a permanently tragic figure. A night can be enjoyable while contributing to something destructive. An excuse can make friends laugh while simultaneously revealing something frightening to anyone who understands what it conceals.

This tonal balance has divided reactions.

Some viewers and critics have argued that the film treats alcoholism too lightly or softens its consequences. Others defend precisely this refusal of spectacle as a more credible way to portray functional dependency.

The second interpretation is more productive for much of the film. Garance is disturbing because she can still laugh, work and attract people. If everything collapsed immediately, eight years of denial would be far less persuasive.

Empathy is Herry's strength and her blind spot

Jeanne Herry never seems interested in punishing her protagonist.

That absence of judgment may be the most consistent quality across her films. In Safe Hands looked at structures of care. All Your Faces examined the possibility of repair. Garance asks what can still be preserved when someone participates in her own destruction.

That empathy gives the movie warmth.

It can also stop it from fully entering more uncomfortable territory. The exhaustion imposed on relatives, the possibility of relapse and the diffuse violence of dependency all exist here, but they are rarely explored with the brutality another film might choose.

Garance prefers to stay beside its heroine rather than observe her from the position of those she exhausts.

An imperfect film carried by two precise performances

Debates over the medical or sociological precision of Garance should not obscure what the film fundamentally is: fiction about one particular person, not a manual explaining every form of alcoholism.

On those terms, it works.

Exarchopoulos gives Garance enough contradictions for us to like her, distrust her and understand why people around her keep believing in her. Giraudeau, meanwhile, refuses to reduce Pauline to the sensible woman assigned to put the protagonist back on track.

At 7 out of 10, Garance is less convincing when it tries to organize a demonstration about addiction than when it simply allows two people to live in its presence.

It is in those spaces — a conversation, one party too many, a rehearsal, a silent morning after — that Herry recovers her particular talent for looking at people before looking at the social issue they are supposedly there to illustrate.