Drinking Movies: Down and Out at Cannes
By Inney Prakash June 18, 2026
Screenshot of Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return.
I first got sober at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019. Two days into the festival, I woke up with my ever-present hangover in a hilltop apartment lent to me by a Parisian friend. After deciding to spend my modest savings on what should have been a cinephile’s fantasy vacation, my initial endorphin cloud cleared to reveal my true motivations: an attempt to escape depression, temporarily forget my unemployment, and ward off paralysis about what to do with my life. Nicolas Cage went to Las Vegas to drink himself to death in Leaving Las Vegas (dir. Mike Figgis, 1995), Tabea Blumenschein in Ticket of No Return (dir. Ulrike Ottinger, 1979) went to Berlin, and I went to Cannes.
In the Ottinger film, Blumenschein’s character, Sie, chooses Berlin because it’s unfamiliar—nihilism is easier to indulge in a place full of strangers. She tumbles through the night in a surreal and plotless sequence of vignettes that conjures the aimlessness of a good bender. Her drink of preference is cognac; she downs it several glasses at a time. After she picks up a homeless woman as her drinking buddy, the pair cavorts around town, now sousing in a bar, now a cafe, now a hotel. They’re followed by a chorus of three women in matching suits—embodying “Common Sense,” “Social Issues,” and “Accurate Statistics”—who babble about the dangers of alcoholism. “Did you know that between Moscow and Los Angeles,” asks Accurate Statistics, “only ten percent of the population is teetotal?”
Looking around, I felt that in Cannes the statistic might be 0 percent. Not that people were falling down drunk everywhere; it’s just the kind of place where the hands of the clock are lubricated by a steady stream of cocktails and champagne, and deals are made to the clinking of glasses. That second afternoon, as my temples throbbed with anguish, I recounted the number of drinks I’d had the previous day and into the night. My standard order was a well tequila with a tall glass of anything on draft. I was already in a precarious financial position, but my trip had turned me into a walking converter of EUR into ABV. The bars in Cannes had no stools for solitary lingering, so I’d head from one to the next without ever sitting down.
It had previously been suggested to me by friends, strangers, a therapist, and a tarot card reader that I had a problem with alcohol. Despite the fact that I’d been drunk almost every night from ages twenty-one to twenty-seven, I found this notion absurd. It might have been true that I drank because of my problems. Depression, penury, loneliness; these were ailments for which alcohol was a salve. However, I didn’t feel that alcohol made my life any more difficult than it already was. If anything, it made it a little more bearable, and often more fun. I found camaraderie in bars, and I hung around one back home in Detroit so often that they’d hired me as a bartender. The two or three times I’d been convinced to go to an AA meeting, they seemed exactly like how they were portrayed in movies: pathetic, cultlike gatherings in dingy, fluorescent-lit church basements.
But waking up in Cannes at 3 P.M., hungover and suicidal in the dark—in my drunkenness I had failed to deduce the process by which a simple mechanism lifted the metal grate covering the door to the balcony—compelled me to turn on my phone and google “AA meetings in Cannes.” It turned out that a group of British expats had established a meeting in an inconspicuous church on the far side of the Croisette. I made my bleary way there, walking past the Carlton Cannes, recognizable from To Catch a Thief (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1955), to the address listed online. Thankfully, the meeting was in a small, skylit room on the ground floor rather than in the basement. A lanky, acerbic Londoner who reminded me of Withnail from the nihilistic, liquor-drenched film Withnail and I (dir. Bruce Robinson, 1987)—ironically, Richard E. Grant, who plays Withnail, is allergic to alcohol—gave that day’s “qualification,” spending roughly twenty minutes recounting the series of events that had brought him before us. Whenever somebody gives this kind of testimony, the specifics are often quite entertaining—any number of addiction memoirs can attest to this—but the broad strokes remain the same: at some point in their life they discovered the power of substances, were beholden to them for a shorter or longer period of time, and eventually reached a point of such abject humiliation or near fatality that they became willing to do anything to quit.
The “Anonymous” part being foundational, I’ll omit this man’s name and the details of his story, but suffice to say that he had risen to a high place in his industry, drank himself into a self-imposed exile in the South of France, slit his wrists in public, and eventually been taken in by a sober boat captain who trained him to work as a sailor. If I was more receptive to his tale than any I’d heard before, I attribute that fact partly to the heavenly shaft from the skylight that illuminated this reformed sailor, and partly to the rugged charisma that made certain drinkers romantic figures to me in the first place, but partly, also, because it involved a suicide attempt. I had tried to kill myself when I was seventeen by swallowing pills and spent two weeks committed to a psychiatric ward. I drank every night, my self-mythologizing suggested, because I still thought about suicide every day.
Ticket of No Return is explicit on drinking as an expression of the suicidal impulse; at one point, we cut abruptly to Blumenschein’s character reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy “To be or not to be.” In the film, Ottinger herself appears, swigging a bottle of clear liquor and reading from a notebook: “As far as I know drunkards, they’d rather die than drink. Wondrous plan, to heighten a pleasure so that it leads to death.”
Complete text over at The Paris Review
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