Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Alice Winocour
Starring: Angelina Jolie, Anyier Anei, Ella Rumpf, Louis Garrel, Garance Marillier, Finnegan Oldfield
Movies set within the fashion industry are a mixed bag. For every Phantom Thread there's a handful of dull biopics like Coco Before Chanel and outright stinkers like Robert Altman's Pret-A-Porter. As a screen subject it's an industry that has arguably fared best when viewed through a horror lens, with movies like Blood and Black Lace, Nothing Underneath and The Neon Demon focussing on its dark underbelly of exploitation. It's perhaps fitting then that the central protagonist of Alice Winocour's Paris Fashion Week drama Couture is herself a horror movie director.
That would be Angelina Jolie's Maxine, who is hired to direct the short promo that will play on the event's opening night. In reality, such a promo would have been shot well in advance, but for the sake of manufactured drama, Winocour has Maxine arriving in Paris just days before the grand opening.
This is a backstage drama, but of the fashion rather than film industry, and so the process of Maxine making her short becomes secondary to the general turmoil around putting together the world's most iconic fashion event. The movie also focusses on two other women. Anyier Anei plays Ada, a South Sudanese teenager who has been plucked from obscurity to become the face of the event. Ella Rumpf is Angèle, an overworked and underpaid make-up artist with aspirations of becoming a writer. Neither of these subplots amount to much, though Anei and Rumpf are very watchable in their roles.
The limelight is very much stolen by this French production's imported Hollywood star. Most of the narrative is centred on how Jolie's Maxine copes with receiving a shock breast cancer diagnosis while in Paris. Having undergone a double mastectomy herself, it's clear why Jolie was drawn to this material, and she channels her own experiences into one of her finest performances. The scenes between Jolie and Vincent Lindon as the doctor tasked with delivering the bad news are played with a quietly affecting tenderness.
It's perhaps indicative of the glass ceiling that the topic of breast cancer has been relegated to TV, with the most sensitive screen exploration of the subject ironically coming in the otherwise over the top '80s soap Dallas. Like Jolie, that storyline saw actress Barbara Bel Geddes draw on her own experience, delivering one of the all-time great small screen performances in the process. As someone with secondary experience of breast cancer, having watched my mother deal with it (ultimately successfully), I probably couldn't help but be affected by Winocour and Jolie's portrayal, but I'm not sure there's enough dramatic meat here to satisfy general audiences.
At one point Angèle is brought to tears when a writing tutor bluntly tells her "just because something is real doesn't make it interesting." Much of Couture feels real, from Maxine's handling of her diagnosis to the backstage portrayal of Paris Fashion Week, but I'm not sure anyone who doesn't have experience of either subject will find any of it particularly interesting. But as she previously did with Eva Green in Proxima and Virginie Efira in Paris Memories, Winocour once again demonstrates a talent for mining understated yet captivating performances from her leading ladies.
Couture is on UK/ROI VOD from April 20th.
