Angelina Jolie anchors a muted, contemplative drama in French director Alice Winocour’s Couture. The movie, which premiered at TIFF, follows three girls throughout Paris Style Week Jolie is Maxine Walker, a goth-adjacent indie horror director who has been commissioned to make a brief movie for a runway present. She crosses paths with Ada (Anyier Anei), an 18-year-old South Sudanese mannequin who touches down in France on the eve of her first job, and Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a seasoned make-up artist engaged on her first ebook.
For a movie set amid the chaos of Style Week, Couture is kind of staid because it offers with the heavy circumstances that every girl is going through. Maxine arrives in Paris on the heels of a most cancers analysis, directing an eerie vampire movie that retains questions of mortality on the entrance of thoughts. Ada, in the meantime, is grappling with navigating this chaotic new world, surrounded by largely white trend fashions who’re as apathetic as they’re hanging.
Lastly, Angèle should contend along with her personal ambitions as a author whereas flitting backstage and brushing up the make-up of the fashions. Couture does not go massive on emotion in a visible means, as an alternative letting us settle into the every day rhythms of those girls as they course of the world round them. Winocour depends as an alternative on her actors to convey the hefty toll such a jet-setting life can take.
It is an enchanting method for the movie, one which leaves room for an vacancy that feels prefer it’s attempting to mirror the world it navigates, although there are gestures to depth that really feel left on the reducing room flooring just like the scraps of material sheared off a gown. The distinction between this easy method and the high-energy of the style world is partaking nonetheless, even when Couture does not fairly attain the emotional heights it is striving for.
Couture’s Subtlety Would not Lack Nuance
Jolie is, in fact, the large draw right here. Maxine is a little bit of an enigma, navigating a seemingly contentious divorce and tumultuous relationship along with her daughter, the pair of whom are solely heard over the cellphone. She’s trapped between ambition — after the runaway movie, she has one other main undertaking lined up — and her dedication to her household, which makes her analysis all of the extra vital in the way it determines her subsequent steps.
Does she deal with herself (and her daughter) by going by way of therapy and forgoing her subsequent movie, which she says she fought for years to make, or does she keep the course and threat her well being to finish her ardour undertaking? For a workaholic like Maxine, it is a harder query than you would possibly assume.
Ada, too, is going through comparable questions on the subject of work and household. She’s left her mom, brother, and father behind, the latter of whom doesn’t know the true purpose she’s in Paris. As Ada adjusts to her new way of life, her brother typically questions if she’ll ever come dwelling, however Ada does not even appear to know the reply to that query.
Angèle is probably essentially the most elusive of the three and the one character within the movie who presumably calls Paris dwelling. Like Ada and Maxine, who’re pressured to make the town their dwelling within the temporary interval the movie explores, Angèle is an enchanting determine, although she is shortchanged by the script, which focuses extra on Ada and Maxine. The latter should resolve if she needs to endure therapy in France and the physician (Vincent Lindon) appears to insist that it is sufficient of an emergency that she ought to.
Ada is with no dwelling, although. The mannequin condo she’s been despatched to by her agent does not have a room for her and going again to her household means going through unsure circumstances. Every girl, then, is in a form of limbo, being pushed and pulled by forces past their management in a world that, although female-dominated, typically disregards their company.
Couture is kind of a melancholic affair, even because it reaches its climax, a runway present on the outskirts of Paris that Maxine, Ada, and Angèle have all taken half in. As a storm descends on the woodsy location, it disrupts their onerous work, making it appear to be, possibly, all these sacrifices might have been in useless. Winocour’s movie does not go as far as to say that the style world is frivolous — onerous work goes into all the things these girls do as they put their well being, our bodies, and futures on the road.
The movie could also be too lowkey to go away an impression, although, and it is onerous to not discover that the power of the characters within the background does not match that of Couture‘s three tales or the best way Winocour’s digital camera languidly strikes by way of ateliers and backstage corridors. Jolie, as at all times, provides a lucid efficiency, however she struggles to rise concerning the movie’s unadventurous inclinations.
Couture premiered on the 2025 Toronto Worldwide Movie Pageant.