Couture
Alice Winocour’s good-looking ensemble drama set in the run-up to Paris Fashion Week is an elegant, multi-faceted and ultimately affecting experience
Phantom threads: Ella Rumpf and Anyier Anei
Photo courtesy of Amazon Prime.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
It’s an essentially superficial stage. Quentin Crisp once said that fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are. In Alice Winocour’s startling, deeply human drama, her characters think they know who they are but are not sure where they are going. Staged like an amends for Robert Altman’s roundly lambasted satire Prêt-à-Porter(1994), which was set in and around Paris Fashion Week, Winocour’s drama penetrates the shiny surface of the industry to tap into the pulse of its dramatis personae. Here are a group of women from around the world, thrown together as the opening of Paris Fashion Week approaches, exerting untold pressure on the choreographers, models, seamstresses, PRs and make-up personnel, all of whom are hell-bent on putting on the best show possible, even as real life intrudes…
Producer Angelina Jolie plays Maxine Walker, an American movie maker who has been hired to direct the opening promo for a high-end fashion house (modelled on Chanel). Specialising in indie horror films, with an eye to a future of more serious work, Maxine hires a teenage model from South Sudan to star in her film. The latter, Ada (Anyier Anei), who needs the money for her family back home (now relocated to Kenya), is not so sure of this fashion business and of the incredible demands it asks of her body. She feels awkward and unprepared, but she is tall, thin and exotic, and is asked to open the show. There’s also a seemingly hostile model whose aggression we discover is a product of her exposure to the violence in her homeland of Ukraine. But mostly Ada’s skinny new friends are good-time girls who cannot believe their luck, that they’re in Paris and are making some really big bucks. But real life hovers on the sidelines, and Maxine, who’s juggling her professional deadlines with a divorce and her daughter’s needs back home, can barely dedicate a spare minute to attend a doctor’s appointment squeezed in as a favour from her own physician.
Alice Winocour, working from her own screenplay, knows exactly where to place her camera at any given moment and Couture is elegantly edited by Julien Lacheray, building up a chaotic mosaic of professional and private lives, of the glamorous dancing on the fringes of life and death. This is the best thing Angelina Jolie has done in aeons, bringing a staggering vulnerability and nakedness to a part that could hardly be more personal. The actress has also directed films and has also faced the surgeon’s scalpel, so the scenes in which she appears topless have a particularly poignant resonance. But it is the stillness Jolie displays in the most excruciatingly personal moments that is so impacting, as Maxine attempts to put on a brave front, until she can no longer do so. Under Winocour’s compassionate direction, there are also sterling turns from newcomer Anyier Anei (whose parents really did flee the civil war in South Sudan), Ella Rumpf as a warm, sympathetic make-up artist with aspirations to write and Garance Marillier as a conscientious seamstress. These are such fully-fledged-out characters that perhaps one wanted to spend more time with them, but in the end this is Angelina and Anyier’s story, as women trapped in a surreal, artificial universe painfully out of sync with the real world.
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Anyier Anei, Louis Garrel, Ella Rumpf, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier, Grégoire Colin, Aurore Clément, Yuliia Ratner, Mona Tougaard, Hunter David, Sofia Lesaffre, Joana Preiss, Finnegan Oldfield, Nina Marker, Axel Granberger, Aida Atarssa, Suzy Menkes.
Dir Alice Winocour, Pro Angelina Jolie, Charles Gillibert, Zhang Xin and William Horberg, Screenplay Alice Winocour, Ph André Chemetoff, Pro Des Florian Sanson, Ed Julien Lacheray, Music Anna Von Hausswolff and Filip Leyman, Costumes Pascaline Chavanne.
CG Cinéma/Closer Media/Chanel/France 3 Cinéma/Canal+/Ciné+ OCS/France Télévisions-Amazon Prime.
103 mins. France/USA. 2025. US Rel: 26 June 2026. Cert. 15.
