A movie doesn’t have to be great for a viewer to wish it were longer. The new drama “Couture,” set in the Parisian high-fashion scene, is at times fairly flimsy, because its many story lines call for extended treatment but are crammed and trimmed to a mere hour and three-quarters. The title isn’t misleading, but the casting is: the star is Angelina Jolie (who’s also one of the producers), but her screen time in the movie isn’t quite commensurate with her fame. Directed by Alice Winocour, who also wrote the script with Jean-Stéphane Bron, “Couture” is a dramatic mosaic, a series of sketches portraying a varied array of women whose work goes into the creation of a runway show. Jolie plays an American film director named Maxine Walker, a specialist in female-centered horror movies, who plans to shoot a promotional film for the brand in her signature vampire-genre style and to direct the runway show with something of the same gothic mystery.
Maxine is the film’s most substantially developed character, with the most detailed backstory. She lives in Los Angeles with her teen-age daughter, she’s going through a divorce, and she’s about to shoot a feature that she has been waiting a long time to make. At the same time, her doctor back home has concerns about a recent biopsy. Soon after arriving in Paris, she’s examined by a French physician, Dr. Laurent Hansen (Vincent Lindon), who diagnoses her with breast cancer and recommends prompt surgery. The other three women all have connections to Maxine, yet she’s not involved in their most developed and personally significant scenes. There’s Ada (Anyier Anei), an eighteen-year-old South Sudanese model who’ll lead the runway lineup; Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a makeup artist who aspires to become a writer; and Christine (Garance Marillier), a seamstress whose exacting work will be displayed on the catwalk.
The compressed script and the snippety editing sometimes lead to unintended comedy, as in a scene where Maxine watches Christine, the seamstress, work. While sewing by hand, Christine accidentally pricks a finger with a needle, and Winocour shows a drop of blood blossoming on her fingertip—only to show her, an instant later, again sewing the white dress, without as much as blotting or bandaging the finger to protect the garment. As for Angèle’s desire to write, it gets farmed out in a clip that she watches, of the late Marguerite Duras in a filmed interview, describing a writer as someone who doesn’t wait for the right circumstances but simply and unhesitatingly writes. By keeping the movie brisk, Winocour also turns it superficial, its substance removed from the realm of experience and trivialized into plot points.
The result is paradoxical, however, because the lack of detailed development afforded to the main characters allows others to come to the fore. Early in the film, when Maxine is welcomed at the unnamed fashion house (the scenes were filmed in the offices of Chanel, the first time the company allowed a fiction film to shoot there), she’s received graciously by the company’s creative director. He’s played by Grégoire Colin, one of the great modern French actors, whose onscreen persona combines unrelieved woundedness with barely repressed violence. His character in “Couture”—wearing a finely tailored suit and a sculpted corporate coiffure—is genteel, cordial, ice-cold, and calmly terrifying. In a brief scene, with just a few glances and a few lines of dialogue, he conveys the raw force that drives the fashion industry and its peacocky displays. A hint of conflict between him and Maxine never bursts forth, but his prerogative lurks throughout.
Other casting choices further skew the story toward minor characters. Marillier and Rumpf are experienced young actresses who’ve played lead roles in other films, but they don’t yet have crystallized screen personae, and the movie doesn’t grant them enough cinematic space to develop their characters. Anei is a real-life model who actually studied pharmacy (and, like Ada, lied to her father about her job), but she has little acting experience, and her presence in the film calls out for patient, quasi-documentary observation that never occurs. By contrast, the three male actors who appear in major supporting roles—along with Colin, there’s Lindon as the doctor and Louis Garrel as Maxine’s cinematographer and, ultimately, lover—are all veterans whose iconic presences make their small roles feel unusually, even inappropriately, prominent. Lindon (who, like Colin, is a longtime associate of Claire Denis) carries the hard edge of worldliness, packs the power of calculation, and moves with an abrupt certitude—a trio of traits that give his doctor character irresistible authority. As for Garrel, he’s heroically hangdog, the professional artist incarnate, self-consciously sensitive and playfully burdened. As the stoic and sympathetic cinematographer, he represents the French film industry with modest and humane artistic qualities that Maxine—and, for that matter, Jolie—seek out far from Hollywood.
All of this makes me wonder what “Couture” would have looked like if Jolie had directed it in addition to starring. She’s an actress of fierce power even in repose, and when she directed herself in the 2015 movie “By the Sea,” an intense story of marital discord, she unleashed melodramatic furies with tense restraint. “Couture” confronts an agonizing subject of which Jolie has firsthand knowledge (in 2013, after discovering that she had a genetic predisposition to breast cancer, she underwent a double mastectomy), and, in the face of the film’s stolid direction, she wisely downplays Maxine’s expressions and lets the subject itself deliver its emotional force—with one fascinating exception. The movie’s turning point is a scene in which Dr. Hansen informs Maxine that she’ll require a difficult course of treatment. He advises her to put all her professional commitments aside, but she’s a month away from directing her long-pursued film, and she poignantly, passionately tries to negotiate with him, as if, rather than trying to save her life, he were a banker calling in a debt or a judge issuing a sentence. (In this regard, “Couture” has something in common with a more accomplished new French film, “The Little Sister,” directed by Hafsia Herzi—an emphasis on the professional infrastructure of daily life, which Herzi similarly achieved through casting. It’s a subject that has long loomed, more or less conspicuously, in the French cinema, in the same way that the institutions of French society, relatively centralized and bureaucratized, loom large in daily life.)
There’s another moment in “Couture” that leaps out from the rest of the movie, in which Winocour’s direction goes beyond the confines of the thinly scripted drama to create an audiovisual experience. Angèle, the makeup artist, has been writing a real-life account of her observations at work, and her writings apostrophize the action, most extensively during a climactic scene in which the staging of the runway show falls prey to bad weather. The windswept tumult is filmed in lyrical slow motion, with high-contrast lighting, and the imagery meshes with Angèle’s text to evoke the inner lives of Maxine and Ada, conjuring subjectivity itself. The scene is a Pyrrhic victory, however, because its self-transcending metaphorical power only emphasizes the blandly literal hour and a half that came before. ♦
