Couture, French director Alice Winocour’s moody drama starring Angelina Jolie, exists in a nebulous limbo.
The film, which opened this year’s QCinema International Film Festival and is still currently screening, is not quite a movie about Paris Fashion Week, nor is it quite a movie about cancer. Winocour has described it as a movie about the “solidarity between women,” but it isn’t quite that, either. Rather, it is all of these things and none of them all at the same time, for it suffers from one tragic flaw: it drifts from one theme to the next, stitching together different narrative threads to make a profound commentary on womanhood, but it is unable to weave together a complete thought.
We begin with Jolie’s character, the American filmmaker Maxine, arriving in Paris Fashion Week, hoping to make the Gothic, bloody vampire feature she’s always dreamed of (the movie includes female vampires screaming in rage at the camera — a rather on-the-nose image of feminine rage, but its place in Winocour’s all-women drama is understood).
There is no denying that Jolie is a more-than-capable actress — this is, after all, the woman who’s given us Girl Interrupted, The Changeling, and a long list of movies where she’s flaunted her acting chops. But in Couture, Jolie almost fades into her oversized leather trench coat as she navigates the world of high fashion, an icy divorce, and a teenage daughter whom she is unable to connect with. It is quickly revealed that Maxine has breast cancer, a diagnosis that leaves her in a shocked, albeit muted, daze.
Stories in Snippets
It is clear that this is a deeply personal role for Jolie, whose own mother and grandmother passed away from breast cancer and who underwent a preventative double mastectomy in 2013. We see this vulnerable connection to the script’s narrative often not through Jolie’s dialogue, but through her subdued facial expressions and tearful looks around her as she begins to realize that her life is about to undergo a drastic change.
But before we can fully start to empathize with Jolie’s character and the ramifications of her diagnosis, Winocour whisks us away to another storyline: that of Ada (Anyeir Anei), an 18-year-old from South Sudan who has escaped her pharmacology studies to come to Paris to try her hand at modeling. Ada is inexperienced, almost endearingly so, and we watch as she struggles to strut down hallways in six-inch heels, stiffens up during photoshoots, and wonders if the modeling thing is really meant for her. Anei gives a performance that is seeped in expressiveness, her face contorting into a brave facade whenever those around her — modeling agents, photographers, and her newfound model roommates — show any doubt in her ability to survive on her own.
Once again, however, we are unable to linger for a moment longer with Ada. Winocour presents us with a few more different storylines, including makeup artist Angèle (Ella Rumpf) struggling to become a writer, and seamstress Christine (Garance Marillier), who clearly possesses an intense passion for couture and the creation of handmade dresses for models like Ada.
Unfortunately, we capture their stories in snippets, many of which are either so expository or so mundane in nature that it takes a moment to realize how they all come together. As Angèle’s writing coach so aptly puts it at one point, “Just because something is real, doesn’t make it interesting.”
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