Movies built from intertwining stories can be hard to pull off. Sometimes you end up caring more about minor characters than major ones—but isn’t that a little like life anyway? French writer-director Alice Winocour’s Paris-set drama Couture takes place in the world of high fashion, though Winocour focuses less on the surface glamour than on the stresses and anxieties simmering behind the scenes. Couture is about the people who make the dream of fashion a reality; for them, it’s not just diversionary artifice, but the bread and butter of their lives.
Couture’s central figure is Angelina Jolie’s Maxine Walker, a filmmaker specializing in low-budget horror. A revered designer has brought her to Paris to make a werewolf-themed short, to be shown at the start of his next show. This isn’t the sort of thing Maxine is used to doing. Though she looks elegant even in her droopy travel clothes, she’s still a woman of great practicality. But her marriage is breaking up, she has a teenage daughter who seems unreachable, and she simply needs to make money. She’s ready to work, with a good French cinematographer (Louis Garrel) already lined up. Then she gets a call from her doctor. Some tests she’d undergone before leaving home reveal that she has breast cancer. Maxine, in denial, asks him if she can just deal with it when she gets home. He tells her the situation is urgent. She scrambles to deal with this new reality while finishing the challenging-enough job at hand.
Jolie is a formidable actor, and she makes you believe both in Maxine’s initial disbelief and, a little later, in her whirring sense of urgency. But even though Jolie’s Maxine has main-character energy to spare, she’s not necessarily the most compelling figure here. Winocour, a smart, sensitive director, made one of the most striking films of 2022, Revoir Paris, featuring Virginie Efira as a woman struggling with trauma after surviving a Paris terrorist attack. In that movie, as in this one, Winocour displays a gift for sculpting small moments; she may be better at them than she is at shaping big, revelatory ones.
And so it’s the minor characters of Couture that we may end up caring most about. There’s Ada (played, with beguiling fortitude, by Anyier Anei), an aspiring model who arrives in Paris from South Sudan. She is to star in Maxine’s preshow movie; she has also been designated as the model who will open the show, a terrifying prospect considering that despite her innate elegance, she doesn’t think of herself as a model at all. She’s an outsider looking in, our personal guide to this weird, unwelcoming world.
Even more affecting is the story thread involving makeup artist Angèle (Ella Rumpf) who, feeling stifled by the shallowness of the world she’s working in, aspires to become a writer. She recounts her daily experiences in a notebook, which she hopes to shape into a published work. In one scene, we learn that she’s hired a writing coach to help her mold these reflections into something sellable. In the video call she makes to him, we see a rumpled older man peering at her dismissively, telling her that although her experiences may be “real,” they’re just not interesting. Then, in a stinging capper, he reminds her how she can remit payment.
The power of Couture lies in Winocour’s gift for layering these types of details. As part of her job, Angèle needs to daub makeup on the models’ feet, blistered from the torturous heels they’re forced to wear. They wince when she does this, and you can’t miss the flicker of empathy that crosses her face. How dare any so-called writing coach tell her she’s unfit to be a writer? Couture is filled with moments like these, small observations that may at first seem inconsequential—yet in the end, they’re what make a movie feel whole.
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