Movie Review: "Couture" Loses The Thread

6/12 ForReel Score | 2.5/5 Stars

Alice Winocour’s Couture attempts to stitch together the stories of several different women who all attend Paris Fashion Week. In theory, a director, model, makeup artist and dress maker all hold relatively similar levels of power within that apparatus. They’re all hired to show up, present their craft, not complain and leave. However, Winocour managed to convince Angelina Jolie to inhabit one of these archetypes and her bias towards that character quickly becomes apparent. It’s hard to blame Winocour for getting fixated. Jolie is a generational talent who delivers a typically excellent performance here. So much so that Winocour’s supporting cast of working actors fight for space and time in what is supposed to be a more balanced narrative. Ultimately, all we walk away learning is that all of these women carry a deep sadness within. I could’ve told you that before pressing play.

Jolie plays film director Maxine Walker. She’s been hired to shoot a vampire themed promotional short film for the show which she hopes to use as a launching pad for her next feature. Unfortunately, she’s diagnosed with breast cancer upon her arrival. She’s referred to a French doctor (Vincent Lindon) who quickly discovers that this is a far more severe case than the initial test shows. As Maxine attempts to keep her head on straight while reckoning with her own mortality, we see glimpses of a few other barely present cogs in this machine. We get the most time with Ada (Anyier Anei), a Sudanese model who leaves an overbearing family life behind to pursue her dream. There’s also Angèle (Ella Rumpf), who is struggling to write a book based on her experiences as a makeup artist that anyone would want to read.

As was the case in Pablo Larraín’s Maria, Angelina Jolie nearly succeeds at allowing us to forget what a mediocre story we are witnessing. Her realization that this gun for hire job in Paris could very well be her final outing as a filmmaker is quietly heartbreaking. She does her best to carry the burden with grace so that she can get the film over the line but is not so secretly crumbling. It doesn’t help that she’s getting divorced and feels herself growing apart from her teenager, who we only hear over the phone. It’s a deeply bleak character and Winocour has little interest in offering her much relief beyond a casual flirtation with cinematographer Anton (Louis Garrel). That dynamic never percolates into anything of substance. He’s just friendly company who may be the last one to see Maxine’s pre-treatment body.

Ada could’ve been just as heartfelt a character as Maxine had she been given more to do. Instead, we mostly just watch her struggle to fit in with the other models who all feel more confident about their place in the show. This is Anei’s first on-screen role and that inexperience does show. She’s not bad. Certainly charismatic enough when given some dialogue to deliver, but she’s unable to fill in the quieter spaces with much of note. Ella Rumpf is barely worth mentioning. All we get is that she’s tired and sad. It just made me grieve the fact that we have not seen her or the rest of the cast of Julia Ducournau in anything particularly noteworthy since.

Couture is the type of film that entirely relies on your buy-in to its’ bleak world building. Some may find its’ more hushed approach to the non-Jolie characters to be evocative. I don’t see much in it for fashion buffs, though. There’s hardly any runway business. In fact, the actual show is treated more like an inconvenience than anything. That may be true for those who work in the industry but it leads to a film that feels completely dispassionate. I have no idea why anybody in Couture even wants to be at Paris Fashion Week in the first place beyond sterile career advancement. Call me old fashioned, but that’s not enough for me to want to watch them.