Couture
Qu'est ce que elle est Jolie...
Couture opens with Maxine (Angelina Jolie) leaving Charles de Gaulle airport, suitcase lagging behind, smartphone to her ear, oblivious to the world around her. It’s a superstar entrance, but shorn of an entourage or curious passers-by. One could speculate that this is what Jolie imagines a normal passage through an airport looks like, but it’s hard to impart a sense of reality onto a scene in which one of the world’s most famous women swans through an international airport looking effortlessly chic. It’s a problem that writer-director Alice Winocour struggles to overcome. Her film’s biggest asset ends up becoming a liability.
Couture wants to be a story of female solidarity, one that traverses boundaries of race and class to prove that all women can relate to one another on some level. Unfortunately, it’s set in one of the most unrelatable fields imaginable, namely haute couture. Angelina Jolie can play many registers, but Alice Winocour’s latest film certifies that ‘relatable’ and ‘everyday’ are beyond Jolie’s reach. Her character Maxine is an indie horror director who has landed a plum gig directing a vampiric short for Paris Fashion Week. The parallels between her and Maxine had to have made the role appealing to the actress in a self-exploratory kind of way. This could be interesting, except the depth isn’t there to back up the thematic ambition. Arriving at her temporary Parisian digs, Maxine ascends a staircase lined with mirrors, as if to remind the dummies in the audience that this is a reflexive exercise.
Maxine’s isn’t the only storyline in Couture, and Winocour’s script shifts its emphasis between characters, in a manner similar to her screenplay for Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang. The star of Maxine’s short film is Ada (Anyier Anei), a South Sudanese model who has sidestepped her university studies to pursue a modelling career, with a mixed response from her family back home. Meanwhile, makeup artist Angèle (Ella Rumpf) acts with compassion towards the stressed-out models she decorates, even while her own ambitions as a writer are frustrated. These plot points are the strongest element of Couture, combining Anei’s innocent looks and line delivery with Rampf’s palpable empathy to produce moments of compassion worthy of the solidaristic rallying call the film wishes to be.
Couture’s ambition might have been achievable if it wasn’t too heavily weighted towards Maxine, segueing from the film shoot to her struggles with a new diagnosis of breast cancer. Consulting with a French oncologist (Vincent Lindon), Maxine is forced into decisions that leave her torn between her family and her future. Whether or not Maxine opts for the surgery that gives the title a double meaning, Couture is savvy enough to focus more on the filmmakers than the film being made, but this only makes the shortcomings of its script stand out. A plotline around the struggles of young dressmaker Christine (Garance Marillier) amounts to very little, while some of the dialogue is laughable. Someone who looks like Angelina Jolie has never propositioned anyone so awkwardly as Maxine does when chatting up her cinematographer (Louis Garrel) in a bar. Winocour’s previous films Revoir Paris and Proxima featured elegant leads facing unlikely traumas, but Couture is too melodramatic for comfort. The breast cancer storyline mirrors events in Jolie’s own life, but her image is greater than the person behind it, to the point that the desired emotions cannot shine through.
For something that aims for a contemporaneous sense of feminine empowerment, Couture’s influences lack relevance. The behind-the-scenes chaos recalls the likes of Living In Oblivion or Prêt-à-Porter, but without either film’s absurdist leanings. The most palpable influence is older still; Varda’s Cléo de 5 á 7 also featured a cancer diagnosis, a supportive assistant named Angèle, and a woman desperate to get away from the glitzy world she inhabits. However, where Corinne Marchand’s Cléo wanted to be rid of her fame, Maxine can’t quite grasp that she looks and sounds too much like Angelina Jolie to ever get away. Couture is unable to convey the woes of the rich and famous, especially when more downtrodden stories are fighting for space in the same film. Couture lacks the suture-tight focus it needs to make its concerns more visible.