Adèle Exarchopoulos is one of those actresses whose overwhelming beauty and restless curiosity from role to role make her ever addictive to watch. She debased herself into winning a rightful Palme d’Or for the problematic lesbian story “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” where she gave an immense performance that changed her life but likely also scarred it. More recently, Ira Sachs turned her sultry, pouty mien into an entire character of its own as the discarded third wheel of an otherwise gay male love triangle in his bruising French love affair “Passages.”
She’s had plenty of leading showcases of her own over the years, but Jeanne Herry’s however rote and by-the-numbers addiction drama “Another Day,” in which Exarchopoulos plays a flailing stage actress who can’t put down the bottle, offers her a rousing top-billed role in the tradition of Gena Rowlands in “Opening Night.” The tradition, in other words, of movies about alcoholic actresses who can command a stage but can’t run their own lives.
A binge now and then is forgiven, but for Garance (Exarchopoulos), four liters of wine a day for the past 15 years has been a way of life living in Paris. She lives in a nothing flat with a starving-artist boyfriend who doesn’t care if she lives or dies (but suddenly does care about the fact that she’s having an abortion), and holds a day job as part of a theater company that entertains small children with silly, costumey performances. Alas, Garance is in freefall, nursing an alcohol habit that’s barely concealable from everyone around her — including her sister (Mathilde Roehrich), who’s in and out of cancer treatment in another example of how this film piles on the mawkishness to add up to what’s basically a slightly scuzzed-up cautionary movie of the week.
The members of her theater troupe are concerned, though not without largesse: They’re all helping Garance in their own ways, including finding another apartment she’ll probably not be able to hold once her relationship sours. She’s the type of drunk who’s really, really fun for a night out, but is prone to waking up at the end of the bus line not knowing who or where she is, her tights ripped, and forced to walk home in a fog of shame. These episodes can be in her favor or not. In one, she botches her way through a lecture to schoolchildren about the ins and outs of being an actress while still in last night’s clothes, hair, and makeup. In another, she shows up to an audition in which the casting agents are astonished she’s gone Method in her attire and disposition to play a drug-addled prostitute, an audition for which Garance never knew the lines anyway. She never even saw the email with the PDF.
Garance does, though, have a curiosity about the queer life, but even that doesn’t manage to pull her out of her stupor. She falls for her hairdresser’s friend Pauline (Sara Giraudeau), a basically teetotaling artist who recognizes the mess she may find herself in, but adores Garance anyway. Writer/director Herry’s script teases with viewers’ preset notions of Exarchopoulos in a queer role, thanks to the Abdellatif Kechiche movie (a culture-shifting revelation at the time that’s now regarded as, well, only a blue movie) that powered her career. But “Another Day,” phew, never takes us inside the bedroom for anything exploitative.
Still, Garance’s death stare into the void, where this woman is still hard-boozing 90 minutes into the movie, starts to run its premise thin despite Exarchopoulos’ terrific and totally internalized turn. The requisite intervention that leaves her fully without a job pushes her into a terrified state of feeling like “a plane will crash on me.” Or is that just the delirium tremens as detox starts to set in? Her willingness to stave off the drink doesn’t last long. Garance falls down, gets up, falls again, and again, but then finally one more time. That’s when the movie takes a direction that’s both maudlin in the true sense of the word and ultimately even sanctimonious regarding the heroine’s sudden redemption.
The thing is, it’s just not that interesting to watch someone get smashed for two hours. Also inexplicable is the movie’s setting circa the dawn of COVID, where masks and quarantine come into play — though for many out there, that was surely a time when relapses were around the bend, the temptation of a bender without judgment and out of view very easily had.
Herry has an obvious compassion for her character, but we get little sense of who Garance is beyond how many liters she’s consuming on a given day (at one point, a doctor tells her she’s on an average of 19 drinks every 24 hours. Incroyable!). Garance seems to be made in the measure of how drunk or sober she is, “Another Day’s” formulaic adherence to the addiction drama playbook blotting out any sense of an interior life beyond “help me, but don’t help me.” Still, Exarchopoulos is a force. Hire her and get out of her way. Hell, hire her to write your screenplay, too.
Grade: C
“Another Day” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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