Fashion is a serious business. It makes people billions of dollars a year, it influences culture in myriad overt and subliminal ways. But when covered on film, this haute world is typically skewered, in sophisticated satires like Robert Altman’s “Pret-a-Porter” and absurdist comedies like “Zoolander.” Credit to French director Alice Winocour, then, that she approaches her country’s perhaps most iconic industry with near total earnestness in the new film, “Couture.”
The film, like Altman’s, is a collection of intersecting storylines, all converging on an elaborate Paris Fashion Week show. Angelina Jolie plays a woman, Maxine, who is new to the atelier scene, an indie-horror director who’s flown from America to Paris to shoot a short film that will accompany the models as they take to the runway. Anyier Anei is Ada, a newbie model from South Sudan by way of Kenya, wide-eyed and hungry as she’s tossed into a maelstrom of haughty men and clubgoing sisters in strutting. Ella Rumpf plays a makeup artist-cum-novelist who observes this glamorous, exclusive milieu with poetic detachment, while Rumpf’s “Raw” costar Garance Marillier is a seamstress meticulously constructing one all-important garment.
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Thus we have entrée into various interesting sectors of the industry, through which we ought to get a thorough, enlightening portrait of process, pride, and pressure. But Winocour — whose career has fascinatingly veered from the thriller “Disorder” to the sci-fi “Proxima” to the trauma drama “Paris Memories” — is ultimately more interested in mood than explication. We do learn a few things as the threads of “Couture” unspool, but mostly we are meant to feel a sort of broadly melancholic wonder at this jumble of human activity.
On occasion, just such a feeling is achieved, especially in the climactic runway sequence, when a rainstorm whips up and epiphanies are experienced. Winocour is a tasteful stylist, employing Filip Leyman and Anna Von Hausswolff’s evocative score to further elevate her already plenty stirring pictures. There are quieter, subtler moments of loveliness too: a model taking a champagne bottle out of an ice bucket and replacing it with her swollen feet, a film director admiring the particular red of fake blood in a movie, an airport goodbye between two young fellow travelers from different war-torn lands. Winocour clearly has a deep care for her characters, and for the often maligned or misunderstood women who labor away in this still-quite-male-controlled industry.
The effort is admirable. The overall construction of “Couture,” though, is patchy and ill-fitting. The crisscrossing narratives should allow Winocour to go exploring, and yet she doesn’t do much with the opportunity. Most of the characters are given plotlines so faint they’re barely detectable. Ada talks with her mother and brother back in Kenya, worries about a rolled ankle, parties with her new friends. Angèle, the makeup artist, goes from gig to gig, engaging in brief and rarely very meaningful small talk with whoever’s around. (That may be a close approximation of the job, but it’s not terribly cinematic.) The seamstress works on the dress and then works on it some more, and then she finishes it. That’s pretty much it.
That naturalistic, lo-fi approach might play just fine were Maxine not saddled with a heavy, thudding cancer arc. She’s had some tests done before her Paris trip, and a phone call alerts her to bad news. This does afford Jolie the chance to share a few scenes with the great Vincent Lindon as a concerned doctor, but otherwise her plot is woefully light on specifics, on anything that might define Maxine’s particular reaction to this terrible news. Jolie has said in interviews that Maxine’s diagnosis was partly inspired by a health matter in her past, so there is something personal at work in the film. But Winocour does not do enough to give shading and texture to Maxine’s dismayingly generic journey.
Jolie nonetheless manages to bring some palpable life to the role, complicating her otherworldly magnetism with a dawning dread and sorrow. She’s particularly effective — and even funny — in scenes with Louis Garrel, who plays Maxine’s cinematographer and possible love interest with understated sex appeal. Jolie is, of course, a master of flirting and seducing on camera, but she does not do so on autopilot. She sharply illustrates the desperation and loneliness that are driving Maxine into the arms of her colleague, the sense that she may be saying goodbye to a certain facet of herself as she is whisked off into the realm of disease and treatment.
That is, I suppose, why one asks a movie star like Jolie to join the ensemble. If only Winocour gave her more nuance to play with. And if only the rest of “Couture” didn’t feel so mismatched with Maxine’s struggles. As is, the film is somehow both glancing and melodramatic, a strange and underwhelming cocktail of blasé Euro sleekness and TV-movie drama. Ah well. At least the clothes are nice.
Grade: C
“Couture” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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