Genre-hopping French writer-director Alice Winocour describes Couture as a “memento mori,” but its contemplative musings on mortality, trauma and resilience run shallow. Partly inspired by Angelina Jolie’s first-hand experience with a family history of breast and ovarian cancers for which she underwent preventative surgeries, the gauzy film gains power from its intimate and deeply personal elements of self-exposure. But by embroidering the drama of an American navigating Paris Fashion Week with stories of other women caught in the whirl, Winocour dilutes them all.
Jolie plays Maxine, an American indie horror auteur who, while preparing to shoot her next feature, has accepted a commission from an unnamed fictional fashion house — though the mirrored staircase and couture workshops are recognizable as Chanel — to shoot a short film about a gorgeous female vampire, which will play as a backdrop to the new collection runway show.
Couture
The Bottom Line
Promising concept, ponderous execution.
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentations)
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Ella Rumpf, Anyier Anei, Louis Garrel, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier, Grégoire Colin, Aurore Clément, Yuliia Ratner, Mona Tougaard, Hunter David
Director: Alice Winocour
Screenwriters: Alice Winocour, Jean Stéphane Bron
1 hour 47 minutes
That film will launch a fresh face into the modeling world, Ada (Anyier Anei), an 18-year-old from South Sudan by way of Nairobi, who has interrupted her pharmacology studies to come to Paris. She has the legs of a gazelle but is so green in the profession she can barely walk in heels, let alone strut with attitude. The white gown in which Ada will open the show is still receiving finishing touches from young seamstress Christine (Garance Marillier).
The other central character is Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a freelance makeup artist and aspiring novelist who translates what she observes into fiction. (She watches Margeurite Duras interviews online, so clearly she’s aiming for profundity.) Rudely treated like a worker drone by the men organizing the show, Angèle’s job is beautification but also repairs. In one of many illuminating casual glimpses of what goes on behind the catwalk, we see her concealing the wounds of models whose toes have been savaged by unforgiving shoes.
In another, Ada soothes her twisted ankle in an ice bucket intended for a fellow model’s birthday champagne (there’s also a cake, something no model has ever eaten); or forms an instant bond with a more seasoned colleague (Yuliia Ratner), a Ukrainian displaced by war, just like her.
But Ada’s interactions with other models in their shared accommodation or at clubs and parties carry minimal narrative weight; they end up feeling like padding. In a phone call home to her mother in Kenya, she talks of the other girls looking at her like an unbeautiful outsider. But that kind of discomfort is never explored, beyond having Ada look helpless while an Italian photographer flaps about, yelling: “Seduce the camera!” Playing this stuff for humor might have given the film a touch more tonal variation.
Instead, Couture plays almost like a joyless mood-piece response to Robert Altman’s Fashion Week satire, Prêt-à-Porter, which interwove a more expansive gallery of characters into the frantic haute couture circus. Neither Ada nor Angèle’s scenes serve as counterpoints to the more urgent drama facing Maxine, merely making the movie feel unbalanced and disjointed.
When her doctor in the U.S. calls with results from a round of tests, she tries to shrug off any thoughts of a serious condition. But he insists she see a specialist immediately, calling in a favor from a highly regarded surgeon to have Maxine jump the long appointment queue. Her reluctance to slip away for an hour in the middle of the shooting schedule speaks to the pressure to perform placed on women by themselves or others, often at the expense of self-care.
Jolie’s scenes with Dr. Hensen (Vincent Lindon, who played a medic in Winocour’s first feature, Augustine) are among the film’s best. His manner as he talks her through her breast cancer diagnosis and the urgent need to operate is kind but firm, briskly disabusing her of the idea that she can return to the States, make her movie and have the surgery in a year or so.
Maxine is left in a daze, which is understandable even if it doesn’t give Jolie much to work with. At times, the glazed sadness in her eyes makes it look like she just stepped off the set of Maria and is still in character. Winocour does better with some of the specifics, like the red adhesive biopsy strips placed around Maxine’s breasts, mirroring the patterning tape on mannequins in the workshop. There’s also a lovely waiting room exchange with a nervous older cancer patient (screen veteran Aurore Clément), full of fears and reassurances.
Jolie’s transfixing screen presence alone makes Maxine hold our attention in a way that the other characters seldom do, with the exception of a scene in which, having been unable to tell her teenage daughter over the phone, she spills out a full account of her illness and treatment to Angèle, a complete stranger.
Intimate moments with her cinematographer (Louis Garrel) also add texture and warmth as she reaches for vitality at first through sex and then possibly a deeper connection. But saddling her with underbaked existential dialogue like “Do you think we’re responsible for what happens to us?” doesn’t exactly draw you into her state of mind.
The movie’s most striking scene, unsurprisingly, is the big show, staged in an outdoor woodland setting (very vintage McQueen) in which the models are caught in thunderous rain, their flowing gowns billowing in hurricane-force winds. Winocour has said she intends this elemental scene to be cathartic, transformative for her characters. But they never acquire enough substance to make the undeniably dramatic images meaningful or to alter the impression that Couture is flimsily structured, earnest and dull.