Couture (2025)

Angelina Jolie transfixes as a woman in crisis during a tumultuous Paris Fashion Week

Couture (2025)

In theaters

Angelina Jolie is surely among the most approachable, the least remote, of great screen actresses. With those unblinking almond eyes, the long face-framing hair, the sensual mouth she opens only reluctantly, she’s got the movie goddess goods in abundance.

Yet for all her cool, radiant allure, she never feels remote, untouchable, unreadable.

On the contrary, she’s so extraordinary looking and so emotionally present she takes over a movie simply by walking into it. The word “star” doesn’t quite capture her force on screen.

As Maxine, a filmmaker of small, independent horror films who’s just hitting her professional stride, she’s cordial with everyone at a Paris Fashion Week show.

Haute couture is not her scene, as a filmmaker or a woman (she dresses in tasteful muted colors). But she’s been hired to direct a were-wolf themed short movie that will present a top designer’s full line in a gaudy nighttime fright fest.

The atmosphere is chic to the max because writer-director Alice Winocur won unprecedented access to shoot inside the House of Chanel’s private workshops and showrooms.

This gives the picture an electric, lived-in feel. Seamstresses bend in concentration, elegant gowns swirl and anxiety mounts under the pressure of a show that’s only a day away.

Winocur is drawn to the inner life. Maxine with her director’s eye quickly reads the nervousness on everyone’s face and realizes she isn’t the only woman on shifting ground. Wondering which models to feature in her short film, she’s struck by a gangly yet somehow poised 18-year-old who’s never modeled before.

Ada (Anyier Anei) has arrived in Paris from Kenya with no understanding of the world of fashion.

The other models welcome her “politely”, hesitantly, and she begins to doubt whether she’s up to the job. Her family back in Nairobi presses her in anxious phone calls to catch the next plane home and resume her sensible prospects as a pharmacy student.

But Ada has a wide-eyed, unaffected hunger for something new that gives her courage even as she struggles to pull off a proper runway stride. It’s from her inquisitive, guileless point of view that we learn how unnatural, awkward and counter-intuitive strolling as a high-fashion model actually is.

The third woman Winocur’s script focuses on is Angèle (Ella Rumf), a fashion veteran who’s seen it all. She’s worked for nearly a decade as a makeup artist on shoots around the world.

She’s always traveling, soothing the fragile egos under the frightened faces she prettifies, and is ever ready with foot salves, tampons and calming words when a model fears she simply can’t step onto that runway one more time.

The model nearly always does, often with a brisk, chin-up push from Angèle. But the weary makeup artist is hiding her own dreams. She’s struggling to become a writer. She’s studied fashion her whole working life and wants to get her impressions down in a novel or a screenplay.

In poetic bits from her work, we learn that she has no illusions. In voiceover she says of the models she beautifies: They had to be fleeting images, bodies without words, but I knew they all wanted to scream one day, like me.

That’s the movie’s slithering subtext. Silent screams are held in check under the glitter.

Maxine has taken the Paris gig because she needs the money. Her divorcing husband is frosty on the phone, so we know she’s a woman about to totally fend for herself. And her 15-year-old daughter pleads via phone she’d like to have more time with her.

That will be possible, because Maxine is about to close a deal on a new, mainstream movie that will take her back home to Los Angeles to work and to be closer to her daughter.

Then comes the shattering revelation. Clinical tests she took in L.A. show she has clear symptoms of breast cancer and has no time to lose in getting treatment. Can she postpone it? Her doctor in L.A. gives a firm no and refers her to a doctor in Paris who can complete her diagnosis and begin chemotherapy immediately.

That cancer specialist spares her nothing. She must begin treatment in Paris and not wait to return to the States.

Maxine has that short film to complete, and she steels herself to stay loyal to her art, as her body careens off into what looks like medical catastrophe. Watching the doctor and nurse draw incision lines across her body feels like a violation.

That collision between what we can envision – in art or fashion – and how much we can actually endure is Winocur’s subject, and she follows it unsentimentally

Ada, Angèle and Maxine all have to come to grips with what’s possible and what they’ll have to summon the strength and guile to make happen. Fashion and beauty consist of moments, splendid but sure to fade.

In Couture Jolie is giving a companion performance to her troubled Maria Callas in Maria (2024), where the world-renowned diva was losing touch with reality. Maxine never loses sight of what’s right in front of her, gorgeous or terrifying.

Both women are artists in a world that doesn’t quite know what to do with their expansiveness, their unquenchable rage to live. Jolie sees to it that each warrior commands respect for her striving.