Alice Winocour

Couture

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Maxine is marked up with a pen for her operation

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 … Read more

Paris Memories aka Revoir Paris

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Mia walks the streets at night

Tragedy destroys but maybe it can also heal. Paris Memories kicks off with a terrible terrorist attack in a Paris restaurant. A man, school-shooting style, wandering through the place and putting a bullet into everything that moves. It’s a grim and powerful opener directed with an eye for maximum shock by Alice Winocour, whose films usually focus on intangible emotion rather than concrete deed. You get both in these opening moments. But once she’s made her opening statement, Winocour reverts to type. The film is about the aftermath rather than the event, with Virginie Efira playing one survivor who, amnesiac since that night, only returns to the scene of the atrocity by accident … Read more