By John Corrado
It becomes clear early on in Couture, the latest film from French director Alice Winocour, that Angelina Jolie will be giving one of her most personal performances.
Jolie stars in the film as Maxine Walker, an American horror filmmaker who is in France for Paris Fashion Week. She has been commissioned to shoot a short film that will open the runway show; a vampire-themed piece complete with a fanged model.
It’s only a couple scenes in that she gets a call from her doctor back in America, informing her that her test results have come back and the news isn’t good. They have found an “atypia” that signifies breast cancer, and she will need to undergo surgery. This storyline clearly hits home for Jolie, who lost her mother to breast cancer, and underwent a double mastectomy to reduce her own risk of developing the disease.
Winocour’s film unfolds entirely during Paris Fashion Week, and focuses on a few intersecting characters. Ada (Anyier Anei) is a young model from South Sudan navigating being away from her family and home country for the first time. Angèle (Ella Rumpf) is a French a makeup artist with aspirations of being a writer. Angèle’s story feels the least fleshed out of the three, and even less developed as a character is Christine (Garance Marillier), a dressmaker who appears periodically throughout the film but isn’t given much in the way of a compelling storyline.
Jolie’s storyline is the strongest part of Couture, with the actress able to bring a depth of feeling to her emotionally raw performance. She is very good here, and complimented nicely by French actor Louis Garrel, a magnetic presence as the cinematographer working on her short. But a better script wouldn’t have left Jolie feeling somewhat stranded as the strongest piece of what is otherwise a featherweight film, one that feels too airy for its own good.
As a multi-character drama, Couture is mostly hit and miss in terms of how engaging each of the pieces are on their own. The film meanders and is pretty light on plot, which makes it feel somewhat hollow. Winocour is trying to balance a cancer drama with a more observational, slice of life film set in the modelling world. But the two halves don’t quite come together, and the approach can feel overly detached when not focusing on Jolie’s Maxine. Winocour is more interested in offering a mosaic of moments from the fashion world, but the actual insights on it are pretty thin. See it for Jolie.
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