Style is a severe enterprise. It makes individuals billions of {dollars} a yr, it influences tradition in myriad overt and subliminal methods. However when lined on movie, this haute world is often skewered, in subtle satires like Robert Altman’s “Pret-a-Porter” and absurdist comedies like “Zoolander.” Credit score to French director Alice Winocour, then, that she approaches her nation’s maybe most iconic business with close to whole earnestness within the new movie, “Couture.”
The movie, like Altman’s, is a set of intersecting storylines, all converging on an elaborate Paris Style Week present. Angelina Jolie performs a lady, Maxine, who’s new to the atelier scene, an indie-horror director who’s flown from America to Paris to shoot a brief movie that may accompany the fashions as they take to the runway. Anyier Anei is Ada, a beginner mannequin from South Sudan by the use of Kenya, wide-eyed and hungry as she’s tossed right into a maelstrom of haughty males and clubgoing sisters in strutting. Ella Rumpf performs a make-up artist-cum-novelist who observes this glamorous, unique milieu with poetic detachment, whereas Rumpf’s “Uncooked” costar Garance Marillier is a seamstress meticulously developing one all-important garment.
Thus we now have entrée into varied fascinating sectors of the business, via which we must get a radical, enlightening portrait of course of, delight, and stress. However Winocour — whose profession has fascinatingly veered from the thriller “Dysfunction” to the sci-fi “Proxima” to the trauma drama “Paris Reminiscences” — is in the end extra concerned about temper than explication. We do be taught just a few issues because the threads of “Couture” unspool, however principally we are supposed to really feel a type of broadly melancholic marvel at this jumble of human exercise.
From time to time, simply such a sense is achieved, particularly within the climactic runway sequence, when a rainstorm whips up and epiphanies are skilled. Winocour is a tasteful stylist, using Filip Leyman and Anna Von Hausswolff’s evocative rating to additional elevate her already loads stirring footage. There are quieter, subtler moments of loveliness too: a mannequin taking a champagne bottle out of an ice bucket and changing it along with her swollen toes, a movie director admiring the actual purple of pretend blood in a film, an airport goodbye between two younger fellow vacationers from completely different war-torn lands. Winocour clearly has a deep take care of her characters, and for the customarily maligned or misunderstood girls who labor away on this still-quite-male-controlled business.
The hassle is admirable. The general building of “Couture,” although, is patchy and ill-fitting. The crisscrossing narratives ought to enable Winocour to go exploring, and but she doesn’t do a lot with the chance. A lot of the characters are given plotlines so faint they’re barely detectable. Ada talks along with her mom and brother again in Kenya, worries a couple of rolled ankle, events along with her new pals. Angèle, the make-up artist, goes from gig to gig, participating briefly and infrequently very significant small speak with whoever’s round. (That could be a detailed approximation of the job, but it surely’s not terribly cinematic.) The seamstress works on the costume after which works on it some extra, after which she finishes it. That’s just about it.
That naturalistic, lo-fi strategy would possibly play simply fantastic had been Maxine not saddled with a heavy, thudding most cancers arc. She’s had some exams completed earlier than her Paris journey, and a cellphone name alerts her to dangerous information. This does afford Jolie the prospect to share just a few scenes with the nice Vincent Lindon as a involved physician, however in any other case her plot is woefully mild on specifics, on something that may outline Maxine’s specific response to this horrible information. Jolie has stated in interviews that Maxine’s prognosis was partly impressed by a well being matter in her previous, so there’s something private at work within the movie. However Winocour doesn’t do sufficient to offer shading and texture to Maxine’s dismayingly generic journey.
Jolie nonetheless manages to convey some palpable life to the function, complicating her otherworldly magnetism with a dawning dread and sorrow. She’s significantly efficient — and even humorous — in scenes with Louis Garrel, who performs Maxine’s cinematographer and potential love curiosity with understated intercourse enchantment. Jolie is, in fact, a grasp of flirting and seducing on digicam, however she doesn’t accomplish that on autopilot. She sharply illustrates the desperation and loneliness which are driving Maxine into the arms of her colleague, the sense that she could also be saying goodbye to a sure side of herself as she is whisked off into the realm of illness and remedy.
That’s, I suppose, why one asks a film star like Jolie to affix the ensemble. If solely Winocour gave her extra nuance to play with. And if solely the remainder of “Couture” didn’t really feel so mismatched with Maxine’s struggles. As is, the movie is someway each glancing and melodramatic, an odd and underwhelming cocktail of blasé Euro sleekness and TV-movie drama. Ah nicely. Not less than the garments are good.
Grade: C
“Couture” premiered on the 2025 Toronto Worldwide Movie Pageant. It’s at the moment looking for U.S. distribution.
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