One for the Road

Hervé, who runs a press agency, is an alcoholic. Drink is taking his marriage, his family and his work one by one, and he still will not admit it. Out of options, he checks into a clinic in Geneva. There he meets people like himself, and one in particular, a young woman named Magali, and tries to stop looking at life from the bottom of a bottle. Philippe Godeau's film neither romanticises addiction nor lectures about it; it shows that recovery is not a straight line and that relapses are part of the process too. François Cluzet plays Hervé and carries the part without overplaying it. Mélanie Thierry plays Magali. The group scenes at the clinic are the strongest passages in the film; nobody there is a hero.