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.”

***

The first film I was able to get into after that meeting was an anniversary screening of The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980). I’d seen the film before, but this time I realized that it was about an alcoholic who tries to dry out. At the beginning of the film, Jack Nicholson’s character attempts to convince a skeptical Shelley Duvall that a move to the Overlook Hotel will buoy his freshly promised sobriety. We learn that the hotel’s previous caretaker went down by whiskey, and Jack’s fateful rendezvous with a spectral barman has become one of the movie’s most iconic scenes. Stephen King’s novel is even more explicit on the theme of alcoholism. On my earlier viewings, this had never seemed central or even more than tertiary to the plot—call it denial. A seasoned AA might’ve categorized the timing of my present revelation as a message from my “higher power.”

I stayed sober for five days at Cannes after a virtually unbroken six-and-a-half-year streak of drunken nights. Each day, I returned to the meeting in the small church and listened to another tale of substance-fueled abjection. I watched whatever movies I could get a ticket to. I stumbled into Tommaso (dir. Abel Ferrara, 2019), starring Willem Dafoe as a recovering-alcoholic artist living in Rome. I watched Moulin Rouge (dir. John Huston, 1952), about the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who’s depicted dying, after years of alcohol abuse, in a drunken tumble down the stairs. Where were the cheerful films about drinking?

Afterward, still fragile, I bought a cheap flight to London and stayed in a hostel above a pub, where I promptly relapsed (the term favored by alcoholics). I plowed through what remained of my savings and returned home to Detroit, broke and prospectless. In a fugue state, I returned to the bar I used to work at—an Irish pub in a Mexican neighborhood, owned by an ornery Pole—and begged for my job back. Rejected, I insulted the owner. He insulted me. I stumbled out the door and into my car, speeding around the corner to my apartment, where I ran inside, grabbed a knife from a kitchen drawer, closed my eyes, and slashed away blindly at my arm. The rest is montage: a delirious ride to the hospital; a pathetic attempt at lying to the intake coordinator about the cause of injury; a wheeled admission to the emergency room; a transfer to a psychiatric ward in the nearby suburbs. I had been drugged at some point. When I woke, it was to the sound of my new roommate singing Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” in the shower adjoining our room. For the first time in years, in a locked-down psychiatric ward, I would have to survive without a drop of alcohol.

***

I was kept there for nine days. One afternoon, I flipped through the channels until I found Turner Classic Movies; Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings (1939) was on. Cary Grant poured Jean Arthur a drink and then one for himself. It’s the kind of shadowy mid-century film that is not about alcohol but is atmospherically drenched in it; it’s largely set in a bar and people are constantly doing shots. There was little to do in the ward and I watched as much TCM as I was allowed. On the day I was discharged, a nurse brought in a bootleg DVD of Glass (dir. M. Night Shyamalan, 2019), about people with superpowers confined to a high-security psychiatric facility, which seemed in poor taste, but as my ride arrived a few minutes into the movie and I never finished it, I can’t say for sure.

I finally had to admit I had a life-and-death problem, and once I was discharged from the hospital, I began attending AA meetings regularly. Some were uninspiring, just a few people in the much-dreaded fluorescent church basement. Others felt full, alive, diverse, and almost like normal social gatherings. The beaming positivity of certain recovering alcoholics can keep any locale from feeling too depressing. One meeting that I began to frequent took place at a bar in a museum. A group of seventy or so people sat before a splendid display of fine liquors while speaking deeply and profoundly of their inability to handle them. I sat down and raised my hand and said, “My name is Inney and I’m an alcoholic,” a litany I would come to repeat ad infinitum, a mantra for my desperate attempt to hang on to life.

I saw few people besides my roommates, and each day I returned home and watched movies. A screwball phase led me to the perfection of Holiday (dir. George Cukor, 1938), starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Released a year before Only Angels Have Wings, it’s another not-about-drinking film that stands out for its explicit acknowledgement of its boozy atmosphere (this one cheerier). Hepburn’s character has a brother who is clearly an alcoholic, and whose drinking casts a curiously dark shadow on the otherwise lighthearted plot. She asks him what it’s like to get drunk.

“To begin with, it brings you to life … and then pretty soon the game starts. A swell game. A terribly exciting game. You see, you think clear as crystal, but every move, every sentence is a problem. It gets pretty interesting.”

“You get beaten though, don’t you?”

“Sure, but that’s good too. Then you don’t mind anything, not anything at all.”

I got a job at a bookstore and began to daydream about a move to New York City. I wanted a new environment, one not marked by familiar watering holes. In AA they call moves like this “pulling a geographic” (think Jack’s move to the Overlook Hotel) and recommend against them in the first year of sobriety. I reasoned that New York wasn’t like other places; it had more of everything, including AA meetings. I saved up enough to get myself started, found a gig working for a film festival, packed a single suitcase, and left Detroit and my life of drunkenness behind.

***

For my first few months in the city, I worked as an extra on TV shows like Succession and Billions and went to the movies all the time. I found myself drawn to avant-garde film screenings at venues like MoMA and Anthology Film Archives. Still sober, I placed great value in stroboscopic films that could simulate a feeling of delirium or intoxication without the aid of any substances, like Zen for Film (dir. Nam June Paik, 1965). The work consists of seven minutes of clear leader—transparent film—looped through a projector. All the eye perceives is the flicker of light and the dust and scratches that have accrued on the leader since its last projection. It’s a beguiling experience that recalled for me both the mesmeric aspect of being under the influence and the new-to-me meditative, clearheaded state that is its opposite. It’s an occasion for contemplativeness but also, like the human body, a record of its own deterioration.

Then I got lucky—I managed to find work as a film programmer at a small cinema, and, when the pandemic hit a few weeks later, I was able to stay on part-time, curating virtual selections while collecting unemployment. I found myself in the peculiar position of having more money and time than ever before, and took the opportunity to start an experimental film festival. Its niche and limited but nonetheless surprising resonance with a certain community of cinephiles would allow me to build a career in the coming years. Having seen Tommaso, I discovered more Abel Ferrara movies during lockdown, and that many of them dealt explicitly with substance abuse. The most compelling to me was The Addiction (dir. Abel Ferrara, 1995), which analogizes heroin addiction by way of vampirism. It opens with footage of the My Lai massacre, implicitly situating a seemingly individual problem within a larger context of social depravity. Lili Taylor plays Kathy, a philosophy student. She’s cornered in the night by a vampire who says, “Just tell me to go away,” but she can’t do it. While the subsequent bite turns her into a vampire, this failure of her will turns her into a pretentious determinist, quoting Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to narrate her downward spiral. “It’s the violence of my will against theirs,” she says of her increasingly hostile attitude. In AA, alcoholism is frequently defined as a disease of the will, and substance abuse as an attempt to combat it. “We drink to escape the fact we’re alcoholics,” as Kathy puts it.

In the bloom of a new life, my interest in AA fell by the wayside. I stopped attending meetings or maintaining contact with my peers and believed I had no problem staying sober on my own. When public life began to return in 2021, my colleagues at the cinema and I made a plan to attend Cannes. The 2020 edition had been canceled, and that year’s festival was returning two months later than normal, in the sweltering month of July (as opposed to balmy May). I’d be returning with a job, friends, and colleagues, determined to best the environment that had so thoroughly trounced me, forgetting it was also the environment that instigated my first bout of sobriety—a friend perhaps, rather than an adversary.

When we arrived, the heat bore down immediately. I could feel the drunkenness of my last time here in my bones. After settling in, I practically ran down the Croisette to the church where I’d had my first meeting, but it was locked. I returned to my hotel with a sense of foreboding. The Shining, I remembered, was not about madness induced by drinking but about the madness induced by not drinking without having found any substitutions.

I began to watch movies, to meet people and go out with my colleagues, but I remained on edge. It was as if the drunkenness of my first time in Cannes hadn’t quite worn off, or that I had been hit by a much-delayed hangover. “The old adage from Santayana,” says Kathy in The Addiction, “that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, is a lie. There is no history. Everything we are is eternally with us.”

***

On the night of July 10, I dressed up in my brown satin tux, got a “Magnifique” from the red-carpet bouncer at the Grand Lumière, the festival’s flagship venue, and entered a screening of a famous actor’s latest directorial effort, about a con man’s relationship with his admiring daughter. I didn’t know a movie could be so bad. It genuinely depressed me how bad it was as I streamed out of the theater alongside hundreds of other spectators. It would be irresponsible to suggest that the quality of the film precipitated what happened next, but I’d be dishonest if I said it wasn’t a factor.

My boss, colleagues, and I ran into someone I vaguely knew from New York. He invited us to a party in the hills, so we hopped into an Uber and made our way to a large villa. At some point I was introduced to a film programmer who had fled Los Angeles after being canceled for sexual harassment and was now starting a film festival in NYC. Word had gotten around about his endeavors. Why was I in the position of having to make small talk with this man?

“I heard you’re starting an anti-woke film festival,” I said.

“It’s more post-woke,” he replied.

I thought this was the dumbest thing I had heard in a long time. Without a single thought, I walked toward the nearest open liquor bottle and took a swig. The tension in my body released immediately. I felt free, and for the next hour was the most charming version of myself I’d been on the entire trip.  “You seem sharper,” my colleague said. I kept drinking.

By the time we got back to our Airbnb, my mood was turning. I soon broke into tears. My colleagues cornered me in a room to keep me away from our boss. I’ve rarely felt as gutted as I did the next morning, with my first actual hangover in two years; I knew I had made a mistake  and was determined not to repeat it. To most people, one slipup might not seem like a big deal, but the program necessitates a reset. One year, six months, twenty-four hours—gone.

For the next few days, I wandered the Croisette like a zombie, seeing movies but not registering them. Every meal was tasteless, every conversation automatic. I didn’t drink, but I didn’t take any steps toward recovery either. I didn’t have a “sponsor” and had fallen out of touch with my peers in AA, so I made no calls. Eventually, I floated into In Front of Your Face (dir. Hong Sang-soo, 2021). The movie starts with the protagonist, an aging former actress, recalling a motivational mantra: “Everything I see before me is grace. There is no tomorrow. No yesterday, no tomorrow. But this moment right now is paradise.”

The film thrust me into confrontation with the aspect of AA I had most neglected the first time around. Steps two and three of twelve are as follows: “2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” When Hong’s dying actress intoned, “With every step I take on this Earth, let me accept things as You give them. Save me from fears about the future, and keep me in the present,” I heard a prayer that might as well be from the program. This was a God I could accept—the present, the here and now that had eluded me, except when drinking, or occasionally when immersed in a great film.

I tried to be present for the next few days, walking on the beach under the sun, floating in the sea, watching movies that seemed to have a finger on the pulse of human suffering, like Memoria (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021) and Drive My Car (dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021). I reached out to an old friend in the program and was recommended a Zoom AA meeting, where I found a sponsor and decided to begin working the twelve steps in earnest. When I got back to New York, I started attending meetings every day and completed the remaining steps.

***

My next time at Cannes, in May of 2022, I felt solid. Alcohol flowed around me; aperitifs before screenings, cocktails at after-parties, drinks on the beach. In Brother and Sister (dir. Arnaud Desplechin, 2022), I watched Marion Cotillard sip gin first thing in the morning and was disinterested to the point of almost not noticing it. Almost. I returned to the church on the far end of the Croisette; it was unlocked. The man who’d spoken at my first meeting wasn’t there, but I recognized other faces. I recounted my tale of triumph, even if I felt a little dishonest in doing so. If my relapse had taught me anything, it’s that believing in a traditional narrative arc is a most dangerous impulse.

My first thought after waking and last before sleep is still usually about suicide. I’m less inclined to act on those thoughts now, but no amount of therapy, medication, meditation, exercise, or prayer has succeeded in dispelling them. Movies, thanks to whatever perverse processes they work on my psyche, serve the same purpose to some degree. I’ve returned to Cannes several times since relapsing now, and it’s become something I look forward to without complication—a reliably serene working holiday.

Still, there’s an addictive quality inherent to the experience of festivalgoing. You watch movies all day, go to parties at night, and rerun the gauntlet for days on end. The sheer volume of material consumed tends to overwhelm the contents of any specific film, until you encounter one whose force of artistry exceeds the aggregate experience. This year—my sixth at Cannes and fourth without drinking (I missed a year in 2024) —that moment arrived with a viewing of All of a Sudden (dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2026), a work of subtle but extraordinary spiritualism whose three-hour-plus runtime recalls the slow, graceful descent of a feather.

The film is about the director of a senior care facility named Marie-Lou, who by happenstance befriends Mari, a theater director with six months to live. Marie-Lou is attempting to institute a real-world care protocol called Humanitude in her workplace, while Mari is directing a one-man experimental production about the Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, who was responsible for reforming and then abolishing psychiatric asylums in Italy. They are both invested in the ethics of care, in the ways we treat people, and the content of their conversations ranges from the way capitalism undermines these efforts to their personal relationships to death. Mari tells Marie-Lou, “This world is the best. I don’t want to leave it.” Shuffling out of the movie, I repeat her words under my breath. For a moment, I believe myself.