‘Couture’ review: Angelina Jolie is a tour de force in Alice Winocour’s Paris fashion drama

Dir: Alice Winocour. US/France. 2025. 106mins

Alice Winocour’s fascinating vogue drama Couture is a quiet, observational image about artistic girls discovering solace in each other. The movie stars Angelina Jolie as Maxine Walker, a movie director who’s making a vampire brief for Paris Trend Week when she learns that she has most cancers. As she grapples with the tough information, Couture additionally reveals the tales of  two different girls: nervous South Sudanese mannequin Ada (Anyier Anei) and writerly make-up artist Angèle (Ella Rumpf), whose respective creative struggles kind a dreamlike mosaic that’s as intricate as lace.

Jolie appears to bend the image round her 

Premiering at Toronto earlier than transferring on to San Sebastian, the movie ought to draw the curiosity of Jolie’s followers; she conjures the identical bewitching mystique and uncooked poignancy that shot her to stardom. It additionally has the potential to carry the French auteur Winocour (Mustang, Proxima) to the eye of wider arthouse audiences.

In some methods, Couture is a continuation of author/director Winocour’s current pursuits. Just like 2022’s Paris, Reminiscences, which involved an amnesiac lady attempting to recollect the phobia assault that scarred her, Maxine can be looking out to find what’s improper along with her. When Maxine lands in Paris, sporting a badass black leather-based trenchcoat, she receives an pressing name from her physician instructing her to hunt a session appointment together with his colleague (Vincent Lindon, who beforehand starred in Winocour’s Augustine). Within the meantime, Maxine preps for her shoot along with her cinematographer Anton (Louis Garrel), who oscillates between being supportive and defiant.  

Like Winocour’s Proxima, this movie can be about girls pushing towards abrasive males. Simply as Proxima follows a lady balancing motherhood with work, right here Maxine should go up towards her ex-husband simply to talk along with her daughter on the cellphone. The star of Maxine’s vampire movie is Ada, an 18-year-old pharmaceutical scholar from Nairobi. Although she is going to stroll in vogue week in addition to strarring within the brief, she has not informed her disapproving father about her modeling profession. The inexperienced Ada additionally struggles to slot in with the opposite fashions, notably one hailing from Ukraine. The one kindness she receives is from make-up artist Angèle, whose male editor has not too long ago dismissed her fiction writing in regards to the vogue world as inauthentic and uninteresting. 

Fascinatingly, it’s not all the time clear whose actuality we’re experiencing. As a result of we’re leaping from perspective to perspective, and Angèle typically reads her work aloud whereas writing, there may be the slight risk that we’re inside Angèle’s fictional world. The one moments which may undermine that interpretation are the detailed scenes of a seamstress diligently stitching collectively Ada’s elegant white ensemble. In these moments, the measurement of ladies’s our bodies speaks to how the world weighs and evaluates feminine existence. These situations are mirrored when Maxine is marked up with a pink sharpie for her examination, and within the racially charged photos of measuring tape being wrapped round Ada’s ankles, wrists and neck. 

The type of Couture is as evasive as its protagonist. Once we wish to see extra of Maxine, the motion strikes to Ada; after we change into accustomed to Ada, we’re instantly thrust into Angèle’s world. Winocour’s movie by no means provides straightforward emotion. It challenges us by proscribing the angst, the concern and the hardships of those girls to their interiors, requiring a fantastic deal from every efficiency.

Whereas a the complimentary approaches of a fierce Rumpf and a tranquil Anei add to the movie’s unpredictability, Jolie appears to bend the image round her. Jolie has spoken out about her circle of relatives historical past of most cancers, and she or he brings that private expertise to what is likely to be probably the most weak efficiency of her profession.

Winocour lastly permits the frenzy to take maintain throughout a bravura finale that turns a resplendent vogue present right into a stormy, windswept gothic spectacle. The motion slows to the velocity of rising moss as if we’re watching a business for a brand new scorching model and the organ kicks up, assuaging the strain these girls really feel to evolve in order that they is likely to be judged on their very own phrases.