The glamorous world of high fashion can be alluring, and it can be alienating, but in Alice Winocour’s sober, observant “Couture” it’s just another industry. Another soul-sucking, time-sinking, heartless industry, where if you’re not at the tippity-top of the ladder you’re barely paying your bills.
I don’t know much about fashion, but I know a lot about barely paying my bills. Every branch of the entertainment industry relies on workers who get little credit, work obscene overtime, and have to ceaselessly bang on doors just to get paid, on time or at all. In Hollywood terms, “Couture” is about the art directors who make only $6741.36 for their pivotal contributions to films that earn over $200 million. The only way you can’t sympathize is if you don’t understand how money works, or if you don’t understand the concept of sympathy.
“Couture” stars Angelina Jolie as Maxine, an independent film director making a short movie to open Fashion Week in Milan. It sounds like a fabulous opportunity but she’s not doing it for the exposure. You can’t support a family with exposure. She needs the money, so when her doctor calls and says she has to see a specialist right away, her first instinct is to put it off. It can wait until she has a free time, probably months from now. When her doctor insists, and she finds out she has breast cancer, she still tries to prioritize her next gig, not the chemo.
Life, in the real world and Winocour’s film, insists on being lived, even when it’s inconvenient. Ella Rumpf plays a makeup artist who darts from one location to another, fighting tooth and nail for time to make a 10-minute phone call, and listen to some a-hole tell her that he doesn’t understand her book. And she’s paying him to give her those useless notes. A model from South Sudan, Ada (Anyier Anei), has to speed run her first on-the-job training, and pretend she didn’t roll her ankle, and even though she’s allegedly the next big thing in the industry, she still has to borrow money to send home.
If you’re not feeding into the industrial money machine, that’s a “you” problem. The women in “Couture” have to hide in bathrooms to call their family in a war zone. They have to pretend they’re working on visual effects instead of seeing their oncologist. The only woman in Winocour’s film whose personal life isn’t treated like an obstacle course is Christine (Garance Marillier), who’s too busy making Ada’s fabulous dress to even have a life. And she’s too young to feel the consequences of everything she’s choosing to ignore.
Reality will catch up to her eventually, just like it did to everyone else in “Couture.” Even Maxine’s oncologist, played by Vincent Lindon, lectures her about the dangers of cancer and lights up a cigarette as soon as she leaves. Maybe it’s hypocrisy, maybe it’s intentionally self-destructive. Either way it illustrates this film’s fascination with mixed-up priorities.
Winocour takes poetic snapshots of people who break their backs for their jobs, and in return, all they get are broken backs. The women in Winocour’s deceptively complex screenplay are distinct, fascinating, often understated people who operate in a system that cannot function unless they do their tasks, yet has the gall to demand that they thank their overlords for that privilege.
There’s a nobility in their commitment to their work. Tragic, beautiful nobility. It’s just as important to witness what they lose in the process. Even little joys like sex are hard to embrace, and may be abandoned in favor of just watching “The Descent” on television. And cancer be damned, they’ll still probably get distracted by how good the fake blood is, and how that relates to their employment, to get swept up in the same artistry they desperately hope to create.
Some movies are meant to be enjoyed. Movies like “Couture” exist, it seems, to be understood. We recognize ourselves and, with the benefit of a little distance, come to deeper understandings about our own lives and choices. So thank you, “Couture.” I’m going to stop working on this sunny Saturday and hug my loved ones. Maybe I’ll even take a walk.
And then I have to get right back to work because, life lessons or no life lessons, my bills can’t pay themselves.
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