TIFF 50: “Couture” reflects on fashion, bodies and mortality

by Cláudio Alves

In Alice Winocour's Couture, Angeline Jolie enters the film in a rush, already late and running. She plays Maxine Walker, an American director famous for her work in horror, who has been recently hired by one of those legendary French fashion houses to create a short film that will play alongside their new haute couture collection at Paris Fashion Week. She's there to work with the highest budget of her career, pumping out a vampire fantasy in a couple of days as the rest of the French capital prepares for the runway shows. At the top of the world, she's still struggling, burdened by doubts from higher-ups, a stifling schedule, and confusing calls from physicians back home. Those last ones are so insistent that she ends up leaving the shoot for an emergency appointment…

As it turns out, Maxine has breast cancer, and all the opportunities she had envisioned opening before her must be postponed indefinitely. If the filmmaker doesn't start treatment soon, this fashion video will be the last of her. It's juicy material, alright, worthy of high melodrama but treated with the care for character integrity and sober-minded observation that has been evident throughout much of Winocour's career, from Augustine to Revoir Paris. Jolie takes a comparable path of understatement and internalized feeling, doing much more with her evasions than the dialogues when Maxine gets to be bluntest about her fate, though those passages have merit, too.

I'm rather fond of a bar conversation shared with her on-screen DP, played by Louis Garrel, where Winocour asks one of the most beautiful women in pictures to play the mortifying awkwardness of self-conscious seduction. That Jolie makes it credible is a testament to both her talent and understanding of Maxine's story. Yet, the star isn't treated like the gravitational center around which all orbits in this narrative, for Couture is curious about all those who work in this transient non-time, non-space that is the Paris Fashion Week. More than an individual portrait, it aims for the expansiveness of a mural, mayhap a tapestry to keep things in the realm of textiles.

There's Ada, a South Sudanese model who's new to all this frenzy and fanfare, tasked with starring in Maxine's short and wearing the first look of the collection down the runway. Anyier Anei's professional beauty is as much a lead as the fictional director, and so is Ella Rumpf's Angèle. This third fashion-worker is a makeup artist who sees more than she lets on, gathering details, conjectures, impressions of those around her and putting them to the page on her breaks. She dreams of being a writer, but will anybody care about what she has to say? A dressmaker is diligently working on her first solo project for the house, while a Ukrainian model offers valuable advice to her novice colleague and despairs over news from back home.

And just as Winocour's script blossoms with curiosity and respect for these women, her camera's gaze is similarly motivated. But instead of pursuing the narratives each life delineates, it lingers on environmental details with a haptic sensibility. It's as if the camera needs to document all the idiosyncrasies of a world that, while intent on producing glamour, depends on the unglamorous labor of countless workers. Couture is the kind of film willing to pause all narrative so it can gaze at the matter of putting makeup over bruised toes, the prickle of needles on fingers that move with equal parts reverence and exactitude, the way a surgeon's annotations on a patient's breasts rhyme with the pattern-making process at the atelier.

That last matter is particularly significant because, though it doesn't seem like that's where we're headed at the start, Couture becomes a meditation on the fragility of bodies, how it defines us and doesn't. The scrutiny on the model's appearance is ever-present, an intersection of marketing and mechanics, self-regard and self-loathing. But so is the toll of exhaustion over long days of work, the pain of an ill-fitting shoe and how it changes a walk, the passage of time on complexions meant to elicit envy, the mortality we share, whether in vampiric fiction or the harsh realities of a doctor's office echoing with bad news. Through Jolie's pensive takes and more physical expressiveness, Maxine reflects on the cruel inconstancy of bodies most of all.

Hell, this Hollywood goddess is at the top of her game, committing to Winocour's ideas with the kind of fervor that almost landed her an Oscar nomination last year for Maria. Only, here she's much more controlled, eager to project effortlessness rather than the strain of virtuosic transformation, harkening back to something like A Mighty Heart in the breadth of her filmography. Indeed, she brings her writer-director's thoughts on mortality and bodies to a sex scene that should be forcibly shown to all those who endlessly complain about the needlessness of such moments in media. Then and there, Couture may present the first example of on-screen carnality that left me in tears.

In my defense, it's hard not to get caught up in the anxieties of a woman willing herself to enjoy her body for one last night before the malignancies growing inside lead to irreversible change, decay, mayhap demise. If only it were all so brilliant. Alas, Winocour's latest isn't flawless, suffering from an imbalance between performers and storyline conclusions. A partnership with Chanel is another issue, conferring the appearance of an advertisement to a project whose very core should be antithetical to them. Also, the Spring-Summer 2024 haute couture collection isn't worthy of such spotlight, nor does it function especially well with what the script is projecting onto it.

Couture had its world premiere at TIFF, playing in the Special Presentations section. It's also in competition at San Sebastián, where Winocour will vie for the Golden Seashell.