Only the finest of tailors would make a cut like the one in “Couture” after Maxine (Angelina Jolie) receives some devastating news, as writer/director Alice Winocour leaves behind Jolie’s filmmaker as she grapples with a cancer diagnosis to Christine (Garance Marillier), a young seamstress at a fashion house putting the finishing touches on the first dress she’ll complete herself, delicately stitching together the gown that will require intricacy to come out perfectly — the fragility is what makes it attractive to onlookers — but could easily unravel if there was a single loose thread. Winocour doesn’t need to recount any of the times Maxine herself tidied up any such strings over the years when it’s clear she wouldn’t be where she is today if she hadn’t, only just starting to enter her prime as a filmmaker and being recruited to film an opening for a chic French fashion label’s latest runway show confirmation that she can embark on the career she’s always wanted, but all it takes is one random element to pull it apart.
When few can afford to show what they’re actually feeling in “Couture,” it is to Winocour’s great credit in her exquisite fifth feature that it comes across with a casual cool that belies its painstaking construction, set during a frenzied week ahead of a show for a major designer that has a number of people reevaluating the careers they’ve chosen. Besides Maxine, who arrives in Paris with the cache of a buzzy horror film that is set to lead to a more ambitious follow-up, there is Ada (Anyier Anei), an 18-year-old model from Nairobi still adjusting to all the pomp and circumstance when her family continues to struggle back home, and Angèle (Ella Rumpf), who runs from one show or photo shoot to another with seemingly too much experience for her age, all of which she’s eager to put into a novel when writing is her true passion, but her steady employment and a greater confidence in her skills with a touch-up pen than one with ink make a full-time jump seem like a risky bet. It would appear early on from the blank walls in the apartment that Ada first enters to live with other models, only to find the best she can hope for is a spare mattress in a room she’ll have to share, that Winocour wants to pull back the curtain on the unglamorous part of the profession, but the director is after far more complex issues that dog the women at its center, making strides in an industry where what’s considered at large a successful end result may not even be exactly they want in the first place.
Simply not knowing when best to prioritize the personal over the professional becomes one of the great tragedies in “Couture” when Maxine may clearly be knocked back by hearing she’ll have to receive cancer treatment in a foreign country, but perhaps just as cruel is how her body has betrayed her as she’s supposed to move full steam ahead professionally when she’s compelled to conceal her visits to the doctor from the fashion house, lest she seem unfit or unreliable when she’s likely to be held to a different standard to her male counterparts, and recovery from chemo is likely to jeopardize her next feature, diminishing the achievement of the last when she doesn’t know if the stars will align again.
Winocour also cites smaller but no less significant points of pain in such a fickle and transitory line of work, watching Ada patch things up with a fellow model who is off to Milan only moments after they connect and unable to talk to her father who thinks she’s off pursuing a pharmaceutical career when being a model might seem beneath her, a sentiment she doesn’t exactly disagree with. With a baton pass structure, Angèle is the most obvious narrative device in the film and the least developed of the three central characters, though she isn’t meant to be seen as she darts around from one place to another. Still, she serves the story more than just propelling the drama forward when she constantly feels time is being stolen from what she really wants to be doing adds an important dimension overall to the struggle that each of the other central characters face when what they’re valued for doesn’t necessarily align with what’s rewarding for them.
Even if Winocour wasn’t welcomed into the halls of Chanel for the production (and although the designer also financed the film, it would never be mistaken for an advertisement for either the brand or the business in general), the authenticity is unmistakable in every respect. After the director drew on the experience of her brother surviving the attack on Bataclan for her previous film “Renoir Paris,” the parallels between what Maxine, Ada and Angèle endure in a high-pressure environment where relationships can be intense and fleeting and perspective can be warped by the demands of the moment and what it must takes to create a sustainable career in filmmaking result in something that feels bracingly honest. This also seems true when it comes to Jolie as the picture’s anchor, a savvy enough casting choice given her generally bulletproof screen persona, but with most audiences aware of the very public double mastectomy she underwent to avoid the breast cancer that her mother passed away from, the performance has additional resonance as Maxine worries about how to share her condition with her own daughter. Although Maxine’s background in genre leads to her own film within a film having some overt horror in it, Winocour lets her mind stir terror in some of the most sterile environments imaginable, whether it’s the perfunctory white walls of the hospital she visits or the clean, stylish simplicity of fashion house she’s been hired by and in a film where appearances are everything, it’s just one of many ways the director tenderly and insightfully uncovers the apparatus holding it all together, both of the entire operation of a fashion house and the emotional calculus of each individual person participating in it.
“Couture” does not yet have U.S. distribution. It will next screen at the San Sebastian Film Festival on September 21st at the Victoria Eugenia Theatre at 8:30 am and the Kursaal 1 at 11:30 am and 7 pm and September 22nd at the Antiguo Berri at 4 pm and 9:30 pm.