“Couture” is a drama set during Paris Fashion Week, starring Angelina Jolie as a character who is fashion world-adjacent — a goth-glam director of hip indie horror films named Maxine Walker, who has come to Paris to shoot a lavish short (it features a forest fire and wolves and a model playing a fang-bearing vampire) that’s set to accompany one noteworthy fashion house’s runway show. (The house is never named, but the suggestion is that it’s Chanel.) All of which makes “Couture” sound like a backstage movie that’s shiny and glossy and combustible and hot.
Actually, though, the film is extremely neutral and low-key in that French not-a-documentary-but-it-feels-like-one style. Jolie is at the center of an ensemble piece that’s structured as a loose neorealist ramble, built around characters like an 18-year-old model from Sudan (Anyier Anei) who’s being launched as the new “exotic” face of fashion; a makeup artist (Fella Rumpf) who’s writing a memoir she’s told has no commercial viability; Maxine’s sexy cinematographer (Louis Garrel); a seamstress (Garance Marillier) we see sewing tiny trinkets onto the white mesh dress that Anei’s character will wear; and the physician (Vincent Lindon) Maxine has to check in with when it looks like there may be a complication to her breast-cancer biopsy.
You envision Paris Fashion Week as a glitzy thicket of drama, and it certainly has the potential to be. Watching “Couture,” we may think: Where’s the editor-of-Vogue character? The international media blitzkrieg? That’s the kind of hot-mess action that Robert Altman tapped into 30 years ago when he made his grandiose fashion-world satire “Prêt-à-Porter.” But Alice Winocour, the French writer-director of “Couture,” is having none of that. She works in a way that’s deliberately defused of drama. If the Dardenne brothers were to make a film set in the French fashion world (a good idea, now that I think of it), it would likely have more going on it than “Couture” does.
As Ada, the newly recruited model who is just finding her footing (literally, when it comes to learning how to strut on the catwalk) and has none of the hard-partying worldliness of the European models she’s thrown in with, Anyier Anei is captivatingly beautiful, like the young Shelley Duvall — we see why she’s been chosen to open the show — and also quiet and grounded in her sane caution. When she enters the apartment where the other models are staying (there’s no bedroom for her), she gets some lip from one of them, but for the rest of the movie the other models help her out, and they all make a point of supporting one another. We see no drugs, no eating disorders, no pageantry of dysfunction. Winocour’s intent seems to be to take the fashion world, in its slightly unreal glamour and money and power, and bring it gently down to earth and humanize it.
That feels like an honorable agenda, but it’s not an exciting one. “Couture” does throw us one dramatic curveball. Maxine, who’s in the middle of a divorce, with a teenage daughter and a career that’s buzzing (she’s about to start shooting a new horror film), treats her biopsy report with a blah lack of concern. She’s convinced everything will be fine. But it’s not that simple. After slipping away from her film set to visit the doctor (which causes a bit of a kerfuffle, since she won’t tell anyone where she went), then getting an MRI, she learns that she does indeed have breast cancer. This is not necessarily the film we were expecting. And though a health crisis is a valid subject for drama, the effect of this one is to make the fashion-world ephemera that fills up the rest of the movie seem even more inconsequential.
Jolie, drawing on a family history of cancer for which she herself underwent preventative surgeries, gives a vivid performance, endowing Maxine with cool-director verve and then a fear and sorrow we can’t help but respond to. Yet it never feels like the health-crisis movie and the portrait-of-the-fashion-world movie entirely go together. That’s supposed to be the point — that a crisis like this one can happen when we least expect it. But if “Couture” were more intricately about couture, it might have been more distinctive and more memorable. It shows us the surfaces of a fashion world that we often think of as all surface. Ironically, the effect of that is to make us yearn to see it more deeply.
Owen Gleiberman
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