Gentle gothic. If there is such a thing then Couture might be it. A slice down through the fashion industry, it’s also, maybe, Alice Winocour’s riposte to Robert Altman’s Pret à Porter – serious, ground-level drama not airy, star-filled satire.
That said, no less than Angelina Jolie is in it. She plays a commercials director whose big break has just come – an invitation to shoot a short opening film for a French fashion house’s latest collection. As she’s arriving in Paris, Maxine is also fielding phone calls from a doctor back home – I have your results, they don’t look good, he says. Please go and see an oncologist buddy of mine while you’re there. Don’t hang about etc etc.
Winocour’s camera then follows Maxine (through day one of her stay in Paris, meeting the man who hired her (Grégoire Colin) and her director of photography (Louis Garrel) and getting pushback from both, because, we suspect, she’s a woman, before having a conversation with her husband at home in the USA and getting more of the same.
Winocour shifts focus to Ada (Anyier Anel), a young South Sudanese/Kenyan model new to fashion who arrives with legs that go to 11 and photogenic features but no idea how to do the basics. She can’t walk in heels, cannot do the model strut. The other models she is rooming with are supportive and dismissive in equal number. Some show her how to walk. All are intrigued that Ada is studying to be a pharmacist. One waves a wad of euros in her face. Can pharmacy get you this, she asks? It looks like modelling as a source of big money is a notion that has has never occurred to Ada before.
Onwards to Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a make-up artist who takes takes Ada under her wing, giving her nudges in the right direction, little pep talks. Angèle is also a human being with hopes and fears, Winocour wants us to know. A would-be writer trying to get a book published but getting unhelpful feedback from her (male) mentor.
On we crash, the camera finding a cutter, Christine (Garance Marillier) who works in the atelier fascinating. And again briefly to another model, Julia (Julia Ratner), who is already what Ada will become if she sticks at it – worldly, jet-setting, slightly blasé, struggling to stay normal.
Winocour swings about in documentary style as if the camera doesn’t know what it’s going to find next. Somewhere around the halfway mark, after Alice has been given bad news by the French oncologist (Vincent Lindon playing the only decent man in this), she has to make a decision to go under the knife. At the same time, propelled by panic maybe, Maxine makes a grand play for Anton the cinematographer – as if life as she knows it is about to end, so she might as well squeeze the last drops of joy out of it.
Winocour also switches here too, away from the documentary style. Just as Maxine is shooting a gothic opener for the fashion house, Winocour increasingly appears to be shooting a gothic movie of a different sort for us. Fantastical characters, terrible illness, an innocent abroad, nature rampant, everything bloody and fateful.
The prevailing mood is meditative, gentle, with the underlying reality that Jolie herself had a preventative double mastectomy adding a piquancy to Maxine’s situation. You might wonder at several shots of Maxine’s flawless breasts – they’re saying something about expectations of female perfection in the fictional and real realms simultaneously, maybe, or just being rueful about a loss. the film goes by Couture in English but Coutures in French – literally “stitches”.
The fact that Winocour’s film was the first to be allowed to shoot in Chanel’s ateliers says something too. A very quiet thing, it must be said. Like the rest of this sad and strange film.
Couture – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
