If you are creatively inclined in any capacity, chances are you have met a struggling actor somewhere along your path. Not the type who is destined to become a megastar one day (à la Mia in La La Land), but rather the ones who will spend their entire lives doing odd jobs until the next gig comes round, clawing at a dream that may well never materialise. When we first meet the titular Garance (Adèle Exarchopoulos) at one of her theatre troupe’s shows, it’s challenging to discern which one of these trajectories she’ll follow.
Backstage, she is dialled into the ebb and flow of the slightly elevated fringe-esque production. Minutes before curtain call, she stands in the dim light of the theatre’s loading bay smoking a cigarette, while her poison of choice – a glass of white wine – perches on a makeshift table like Chekhov’s gun. While by no means standard practice, a lingering association remains between performers and a dose of Dutch courage before a show, making the moment feel normal, until it quickly becomes apparent that this is far from an isolated case. At the end of this run, Garance is relegated to the company’s youth theatre productions. What was once an audience made up of adult patrons has now been replaced by a patchwork of gawking schoolchildren.
Get more Little White Lies
Though Garance seems relatively unfazed by this demotion, it marks the beginning of a slow decline. It quickly becomes two bottles of wine instead of one, which shatter at the bottom of the recycling bin as she throws them in each morning, and as the glass fragments and chips, so does her recollection of the night before. Her dependence escalates when the troupe stages an intervention, which Garance brilliantly declares ‘the court of potential mishaps’ as she’s kicked out. Without the structure that had kept her head just above water in the past, the small semblance of stability she had long retained begins to collapse. As a self-proclaimed people addict with a vast sea of eclectic friends and her unwavering scenographer girlfriend, Pauline (Sara Giraudeau), she fears the stillness of solitude, vigorously drowning it out unit by unit.
From this point onwards, the plot unfurls into a story focused on addiction and relationships that is inherently human, yet lacks the grounding in the specificity of her lifestyle to make this film stand out amongst the crowd. It’s no secret that many successful actors suffer from addiction, but the case of Garance, the film speaks to a hyper-specific sector of the acting society. The spectrum of success for actors feels far more black-and-white than in many other art forms, and she is one of the individuals who operate in a grey area where the time spent working feels so extraordinary and every moment in between feels depressingly futile.
It is implied that this is one, if not the primary source of her perilous habits, but the film fails to nail the satisfaction of seeing the actress address that perhaps her passion is what propagates the roots of her demise. Even in spite of this, the tremendous Adèle Exarchopoulos excels, committing to every facet of her character’s tempestuous customs and convalescence.
The more stirring sentiments of Jeanne Herry’s Garance are seemingly entombed within the film’s first act, leaving the latter half to suffer from a minor lack of substance beyond the content recovery stories which have already preceded this one. The groundwork is laid for a philosophical musing on the correlation between creativity, codependency and substance abuse, but fails to uplift its own hypothesis.
