Writer-director Alice Winocour’s Couture is a deeply emotional, often touching, and ultimately somewhat shallow look at how the lives of three very different women intersect during Paris Fashion Week. There is depth there. And for people who’ve experienced the same medical struggles as Angelina Jolie‘s Maxine, have felt like they’re doing something other than what they want, like Angèle, or have struggled with the weight of taking care of their family, like Ada, the film will surely hit all the right notes. But there’s no escaping the film’s biggest problem: it only truly gives Jolie’s Maxine a satisfying arc.
Couture follows Maxine (Jolie), an American film director in Paris to film a video for a fashion event. It also follows Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a veteran makeup artist who secretly wants to be a writer. And finally, it follows Ada (Anyier Anei), an 18-year-old pharmacy student who is starting out as a model. It is, in many ways, the typical snapshot of a moment kinda of movie. And as that it works really well. It even slips in some truly poignant moments during each woman’s storyline as they intersect. And yet they don’t make any kind of lasting impact on each other. Sometimes, our own battles are and will remain deeply personal.
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But though Jolie gets a clearly defined arc for Maxine, one that feels very personal for the actress, who lost her mother to breast cancer and who chose to get a preventive double mastectomy after discovering she carried a mutation in the BRCA1 gene, she’s the only character who does. Jolie makes the best of it, let me be clear. If you’re coming to Couture for her performance and her performance alone, you won’t be disappointed. This is Jolie at her best, emotional, grounded, and immensely relatable. The range of the actress, who does action as convincingly as she does aching and human, is remarkable.
However, more often than not, Couture feels like it should really be about Ada and her story. Anei’s character mentions a few times that she was born in South Sudan, and her family left the country during the war. This is a very powerful phrase, particularly for an audience that might be somewhat unfamiliar with South Sudan’s history. And yet this is only mentioned, never really touched upon, just as her family’s issues, including her father’s disapproval of her modeling, or the money troubles that Ada is trying to help them through with her modeling, are not really explained.
In a way, in a movie like this, they don’t have to. This wouldn’t be an issue if Maxine’s story weren’t so well constructed, even without the details. And it isn’t an acting issue, either. Jolie is outstanding, yes, but everyone else in the cast is right up there with her. And Anei, who doesn’t have anywhere near as long a career, is captivating in scenes that suggest that if Hollywood gives her the chance, she’s going to be a big star. So, instead, it has to be read either as a deliberate choice or a script problem.
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Overall, Couture is still a mostly enjoyable film, one that is especially resonant as it tells a story of a woman with cancer that isn’t about the cancer, but about the woman. More often than not, stories about cancer or illnesses in general become stories about the disease. They don’t make it about about the person. And this movie is very intentional about not doing that. But the difference between a good movie and a great movie is in what Couture is missing, not a connection necessarily, but at least a higher level of sensitivity in the other storylines.
Couture screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.
