52 Films by Women Vol 10. 17. COUTURE (Director: Alice Winocour)

 

Pictured: Christine (Garance Marillier, left) adjusts the dress modelled by South Sudanese model, Ada (Anyier Anei, right) in a scene from the Paris Fashion Week-set drama, 'Couture', directed by Alice Winocour from a screenplay co-written by Jean-Stéphane Bron. Still courtesy of Signature Entertainment (UK)

Couture, French writer-director Alice Winocour’s fifth feature, is inessential viewing. Set during Paris Fashion Week, it focuses on four women who participate in the event as model, seamstress, make-up artist and video director respectively. The film is notable for the presence of Angelina Jolie as Maxine Walker, a Los Angeles-based film director fascinated by vampires, whose video opens one particular show, and who, while in Paris, receives some devastating news. Missing from the ensemble is a fashion designer, the individual whom the four women – and many others - are beholden; the film was made in collaboration with the fashion house, Chanel, but no designer is clearly identified. Couture suffers – or rather makes the audience suffer – from an absence of vision. Its weaknesses lend themselves to couture-related metaphors. As a collection of interlocking narratives, it doesn’t hang together. The plot is threadbare. Tonally, it is a fashion disaster.

Winocour is an accomplished director whose previous work – Disorder, Proxima and Paris Memories – deals with professionalism and trauma. Couture is closest in tone to her third feature, Proxima, in which a female astronaut (Eva Green) struggles to meet the demands of her training and come to terms with the temporary separation from her young daughter. In Couture, Maxine is going through a painful divorce – Winocour draws upon Jolie’s personal history – and is currently separated from her fifteen-year-old daughter, heard on the phone but never seen. Maxine is determined to have a fulfilling career but accepted the assignment at the fashion show ‘for money’. Before travelling, she has visited a doctor, who calls her while she is in Paris. He refers her to a colleague who will inform her of his diagnosis (he refers to atypia, that is, cells that appear abnormal under a microscope). Maxine has to balance the completion of her video with a short-notice appointment to see a specialist (‘come at five pm today or wait six months’). Leaving the shoot to meet with Dr Laurent Hansen (Vincent Lindon), she is referred for further tests. However, Maxine is determined to start shooting a feature film upon her return to the United States.

Watching the film, I couldn’t help but think about the production. Did Jolie have limited availability, not long enough for her to be available to appear in every scene? Did Winocour and her co-writer, Jean-Stéphane Bron, adjust the script accordingly? In the edit, did Winocour use scenes with the other protagonists to pad out the movie? Was the project driven by a commission rather than a story the filmmaker wanted to tell? While Maxine’s story dominates the film – and every named actor has a moment with Jolie to the extent that you imagine them queuing up to do so – Jolie is only on screen intermittently.

The next most prominent thread features Ada (Anyier Anei), a South Sudan-born, Kenya-based model invited to participate in the show and chosen as the lead in Maxine’s video. She is directed to walk through woodlands up to a river, climb aboard a boat and flash vampire fangs while she screams. It is Ada’s first time in Paris. We expect her to be in contact with her agency. She has hidden her career choice from her father, confiding only in her mother and brother. However, she has not told her brother that she has no intention of coming home.

Ada is the film’s most interesting character, a young African woman who has been hired for contrast; she has short-cropped hair, the white models have long, flowing tresses. We sense that up until now, Ada has mainly worked on photo shoots. A fashion show requires her to walk in heels, one leg crossing the other, holding her head up, steady and confident. In one scene, she practices in a corridor. She lacks grace. Taking direction from other models, she tries again. Then her heel gives way. The models feel they have pushed her too far. This is the only scene that prompted a visceral response (in my case, ‘ouch!’)

When Ada arrives at a rented apartment, she finds she has nowhere to sleep. Another model appears to have taken her room. Tension flare, but a Chinese model offers Ada a mattress. In a later scene, Ada drinks with the other model, soothing her feet with the ice from a champagne cooler (a dome rather than a bucket); it’s a lovely detail. She encounters another of the film’s characters, Christine (Garance Marillier, best known to international viewers as the lead in Julia Ducournau’s Raw), who fits her dress, noting that it needs to be taken in (‘the measurements are wrong’). Christine works hard but, we sense, wrestles with her confidence. When Ada’s dress is completed, Christine sews a human hair into the hem, ‘for luck’. She receives applause from her co-workers, another lovely moment.

Ada calls her mother, explaining that she has a place to stay and has made a Chinese friend. She is intrigued by a Ukrainian model, Julia (Yulia Ratner), who is heading to Amsterdam for another show. ‘Can I go with you to the station?’ Ada asks. Julia maintains her career while her country is at war with Russia. There is a sense that she is contributing to the war effort, at least highlighting her country’s plight if not, as Ada does, sending money home. In one scene, Ada asks another model to loan her 2,000 Euros. ‘I really need it,’ she insists in English, adding that she will ‘repay it with interest’. On her next call home, she receives confirmation that the money has been received.

The fourth protagonist is Angèle (Ella Rumpf, Marillier’s co-star from Raw), a make-up artist who rushes between jobs, complaining that she has been screwed over. She is a budding screenwriter, having sent her work to be professionally critiqued. However, she is not released from work in time to meet with her reader. She calls him instead. He complains that her scenes aren’t believable. ‘They happened,’ insists Angèle. ‘Yes,’ responds the reader, ‘but they don’t seem real.’ He is more interested in outlining the methods to pay him rather than inspire her to do better. The scene is the only one that approaches satire.

We sympathize with Angèle when she tries to leave a gig at her agreed time and her supervisor makes her tend to one more model. Both Angèle and Christine are at the bottom of the fashion ladder. Angèle behaves professionally, pointing out in one scene that the wrong make up was used on Ada’s legs. However, she casts herself in the role of the observer. By paying for feedback, she is at the bottom of the artist food chain. Neither Angèle nor Christine are shown to have family or relationships outside their job. Winocour makes the point that the pursuit of glamour – creating or enhancing it in others – is socially isolating. While Angèle narrates the final fashion show, disrupted by adverse weather – she describes it as a hurricane – she does not have a cathartic moment.

Pictured: Video director Maxine (Angelina Jolie, left) and cinematographer, Anton (Louis Garrel, right) in a scene from the Paris Fashion Week-set drama, 'Couture', co-written and directed by Alice Winocour. Still courtesy of Signature Entertainment (UK)

This brings me back to Jolie. She doesn’t exactly give a film star performance. Nor does she reveal herself to be emotionally vulnerable. Her acting is naturalistic to the extent that we don’t watch Maxine Walker being asked about fashion by a journalist (Finnegan Oldfield), we see Jolie herself. She describes fashion as ‘useless but necessary’. I read one review record this as ‘useless and unnecessary’, but I couldn’t believe a director for hire would insult her benefactor. Nor would she refute the power of a dress, enhancing and withholding a view of the female body. To some extent, Maxine’s plot line is about red lines, the marks on her body to indicate where surgery will be performed, her insistence that she must return to Los Angeles and make her vampire film. Red lines are there to be crossed. In a crowded bar, having just been told that she requires surgery, Maxine invites her cinematographer, Anton (Louis Garrel) back to her hotel room for sex. Maxine is prepared to give her body to the younger man, but not her truth. In the arts, medical diagnoses affect employability; Maxine is in danger of losing her livelihood and her future.

In any case, Maxine is one of the most distracted directors ever depicted in a film. She walks off set before Ada gives her scream, barely pays attention to the edit and is untroubled when told that the digitally super-imposed jungle cat doesn’t match her film. Winocour writes the character of Maxine as younger than Jolie, but we see an actress whose most recent role was Maria Callas, at ease with yet withholding from the camera. The actress unbalances the film.

Jolie performs the most awkwardly contrived scene that I have seen in a movie for years. Her daughter calls her to explain that she has missed her stop on the bus and doesn’t know where she is. Google Maps has failed her. Maxine instructs to turn and look for a particular building, then walk towards it. Suddenly her daughter knows where she is. ‘Thank you for giving me direction,’ she says. I groaned. Quite apart from the trite validation of Maxine’s character, the scene’s purpose is to show that Maxine withholding her diagnosis from her daughter. She does however tell her that she would not be doing the vampire film. Maxine’s daughter is pleased, though she ought not to be.

In the closing scenes, Maxine opens up. Having been told that some people prefer to cut their hair before chemotherapy rather than wait for clumps to fall out, she and Anton buy a hair clipper at a branch of Darty. In the final scene, Maxine stands in her hotel room in front of the mirror and switches on the clipper. Winocour’s camera pans away before she starts cutting. What will Jolie, one of the named producers of the film, sacrifice of herself for a role? Judging by this final scene, not too much.

Reviewed at Ciné Lumière, South Kensington, West London, Wednesday 8 April 2026, 18:10 screening