Synopsis: Set against the Parisian fashion industry during Fashion Week, an American filmmaker embarks on a life‑and‑death journey of self‑discovery as her story interweaves with those of women from diverse backgrounds fighting to take control of their destinies.
Stars: Angelina Jolie, Louis Garrel, Ella Rumpf, Garance Marillier, Anyier Anei, Vincent Lindon
Director: Alice Winocour
Rated: R
Running Length: 103 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Angelina Jolie is lighter, sharper, and fully present in Alice Winocour’s Paris-set ensemble about women, bodies, and survival. The script frays when it strays from her, but the performances and a haunting score keep Couture worth the ticket.
Couture Review: Sew Much Feeling
It’s been a while since Angelina Jolie turned up in a movie that wasn’t dragging a circus behind it. Either she was carrying some franchise machine and its built-in pressure, or she was the lightning rod on a deeply personal project critics seemed ready to dislike before the lights even dimmed. Even Maria, her finest work in years, came weighed down enough that its cool reception cost her an Oscar nomination she’d more than earned. So here’s the happy surprise I can share in my Couture review: in Alice Winocour’s ensemble drama, Jolie looks lighter than she has in ages.
Mostly speaking French, she feels unburdened, like she’s set down armor she’d hauled around for years. The actress who once electrified a frame just by stepping into it is back. Next to peers that need only be mentioned by their last names like Streep, Close, and Bassett, Jolie has always been fully present, locked in, and that focus is a joy to watch here.
Three Women, One Fashion Week
Maxine (Jolie) is an American director famous for her dark, gothic projects who lands in Paris to shoot a video for a fashion event, juggling a divorce, an unhappy teenage daughter, and a serious health diagnosis that arrives almost the moment she does. She thinks fashion is useless. She takes the job for the money anyway.
Her story braids together with two others. Angèle (Ella Rumpf, Raw) is a makeup artist and wannabe writer turning her own life into fiction. Ada (Anyier Anei) is a South Sudanese pharmacy student suddenly “discovered” as a model and dropped into a world with its own rules. This isn’t an exposé or a backstage tell-all. It’s a study of women at different ages making hard choices about bodies, careers, and survival. When it stays close to these three, it sings. When it wanders, the rough edges show. Winocour’s script simply isn’t as cinched as these three performances, and the film is weaker for it.
When Jolie’s Away, the Seams Show
Winocour hands her star two simple, breathtaking scenes: a chance encounter with a stranger in a waiting room (Aurore Clément, A Private Life), and a charged exchange with Angèle. Both show the director’s eye for real feeling inside a staged story, and the actresses play them with pinpoint clarity.
Not everything fits so cleanly. Anei is stunning, but she’s a model first and an actress second, and you feel it when the back half asks her to dig deeper. It suits the character and still boxes in the performance, though she lands a few moments where selling a garment or an unspoken thought is all she needs. Jolie’s romance with her cinematographer Anton (Louis Garrel, Little Women) never sparks the way it should. Garrel is fine. The chemistry just isn’t there. She’s far more alive opposite Vincent Lindon (Titane) as a blunt Parisian doctor whose flat delivery is exactly the hard truth she needs to hear. That one stings, and it lands.
There’s a fun web of French-cinema history threaded through the cast, too. Garrel once played Eva Green’s twin in The Dreamers, and Winocour later directed Green in Proxima. Garance Marillier, who turns up as seamstress Christine, has now shared a Julia Ducournau film with both Rumpf (Raw) and Lindon (Titane). Similar to the somewhat incestuous nature of the fashion industry, Couture keeps bumping into its own family tree.
A City Shot Like the Clothes
Cinematographer André Chemetoff films Paris with the same care the movie gives the runway. The backstage world of fittings, shoots, and meetings sits at a cool remove, wider frames that rarely push in, so you feel kept on the far side of the glass. Out in the “real” world, the camera leans closer. It’s a subtle way of marking who belongs where.
The score by Anna von Hausswolff and Filip Leyman feels ever-present but only intrudes when necessary. The Swedish pair come from metal and drone, folding church-organ melodies into electronics for something solemn and faintly sacred, gothic one minute and luminous the next. It crests in a long, rain-soaked finale where Winocour finally lets the fantasy of fashion take the wheel, and the result is lovely. Costume designer Pascaline Chavanne and production designer Florian Sanson (Annette) build a Paris that’s couture-glossy and a little haunted at once.
One more thing earns a nod. Almost all of Couture stays in French, even when Winocour could cheat for global reach. Where a recent release like The Furious awkwardly dubbed chunks into English, this one holds firm. There are even two beats where characters are offered English and choose French anyway. It plays like a message to filmmakers who take the easy path. Audiences will read subtitles. I’ll take authenticity over being catered to every time.
Cut From Finer Cloth
For all the runway lighting, Couture is about women’s bodies and what the world does with them. Not workplace politics, but health, advocacy, and the gap between self-sufficiency and isolation. Several of these women have built a fierce independence that can read, from the outside, as a cold kind of distance. Watching them feel their way toward comfort is where the film comes most alive.
The French title, Coutures, means stitches, and Winocour treats it like a mission statement. She’s sewing these destinies together and hunting for the seams between worlds, between a surgeon drawing cut lines on a patient and a seamstress chalking measurements on a model. A Françoise Hardy song drifts through the back half, sung by worn-out models at the end of a long night, and it tips the whole film into a memento mori. Beauty, and then the thread gets cut.
Winocour has talked about pairing beauty with mortality, and you can feel it in every frame. The finale lands a touch too neat for a movie holding this many sharp ideas. Still, Jolie drops enough clues inside Maxine that you sense where it’s going before the picture fades. She’s the lead here, though only just, gone for long stretches while the others carry the thread. When she’s on screen, you can’t look anywhere else.
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