TIFF Review: Angelina Jolie in Couture

Alice Winocour is an idiosyncratic filmmaker who has yet to work in the same genre twice. Her latest film, Couture, is an anthological drama set during Paris Fashion Week following several different women through their journeys during couture’s most important week. Written and directed by Winocour, Couture is also her slightest work, though Angelina Jolie lends the film a movie star glow. 

Jolie stars as Maxine, an American filmmaker in Paris to shoot the video that will accompany a designer’s runway show. She has a light flirtation with her cinematographer, played with a hint of dashing romance by Louis Garrel, and a doctor waiting to deliver her bad news About Those Tests she took before leaving for Paris. Given Jolie’s own public history with breast cancer, she gives Maxine’s storyline some depth and heft that doesn’t really exist in the script. It is only because Jolie has openly discussed her familial history of cancer and her prophylactic double mastectomy that gives us an entrance into Maxine’s interiority, connecting Jolie’s expressed anxieties with Maxine’s circumstances.

Jolie is at times lighthearted and fun, but when reality knocks on Maxine’s door, she is able to peer into nothing and let the audience feel the dread with her. It also gives some urgency to her mild flirtations, as this may be Maxine’s last moments to experience intimacy “whole”, before sickness and treatment take their toll. All of this plays out on Angelina’s face, which, not unlike her performance in Maria, evinces a weariness that her photogenic beauty only enhances. There’s a sort of tragedy borne on her face that she has become particularly adept at wielding when portraying Sad Women. She barely shifts her expression but suddenly, Maxine Is Sad, and we are sad with her.

Another storyline follows Ada (Anyier Anei), a model from South Sudan experiencing fashion week for the first time, with all its excesses and the seedy underbelly of its glamorous façade. Also circulating behind the scenes is makeup artist Angèle (Ella Rumpf), who is also a writer and observes the furor of fashion week with a writer’s keen eye for both poetry and absurdity. Finally, Garance Marillier stars as a seamstress diligently working on one exquisite garment.

The interlocking narrative recalls Robert Altman’s own fashion film, Prêt-à-Porter, though the low-key narratives, somewhat meandering style, and the fact that Couture’s various characters don’t really connect except for existing in the same time and place is more akin to Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women. Couture might frustrate some as “nothing happens” except that we get a ground-level glimpse into the lives of some women participating in a massive cultural moment, and there are some fun observations, such as a model icing her feet in a champagne bucket.

A bigger issue for Couture than the lack of direct plot connections is that thematically, the film doesn’t add up to much. Certain Women does not force all of the characters to interact, but they at least share a thematic throughline of discontent in their respective lives. Couture doesn’t work on that thematic level, though. It is mostly just a collection of scenes. It’s not bad, per se, but it is less than the sum of its parts, especially regarding the breezy intimacy of Jolie’s performance. But it looks great, and the performances are good to great, and if you’re interested in fashion, it has a certain aesthetic appeal. It just doesn’t go beyond that surface level. Couture doesn’t have much to say about couture, or the machinery of the fashion industry, or even the realities of these women, beyond their roles as cogs in the fashion week works. Couture is a perfectly pleasant if ultimately unmemorable jaunt into the world of fashion.