Couture with Angelina Jolie

Couture: the business of designing, making, and selling fashionable custom-made clothing. This new film from writer director Alice Winocour uses the backdrop of Paris fashion week to highlight the lives of three women, all in various stages of life and career. Couture is driven by an emotional performance from Angelina Jolie and anchored with strong support by Anyier Anei and Ella Rumpf.

Synopsis: An American filmmaker arrives in Paris for Fashion Week on a life-and-death journey, facing challenges and self-discovery. | 1h 46m | NR but intended for mature audiences

Though sprinkled with strong emotions, the film struggles with depth. We meet three intriguing women whose story we want to know. But with only glimpses into their struggles and doubts it is hard to engage with them fully. The most important connection is with Maxine (Angelina Jolie). She is an independent film maker hired to create an opening short film for Paris Fashion Week. She is an outsider with no loyalty or connection to fashion. While there she gets life changing medical results. We watch as all her plans and what she thought was her future take a turn. Thanks to Jolie we get a powerful grasp of the emotions that Maxine feels, even though there is so much of her life we do not know.

The character with just as intriguing story is Ada (Anyier Anei). She is a young woman from Kenya who we are told is not really sure she wants to be a model, but is there to star in Maxine’s film and open the runway show. There are small discussions and scene clips that tell us the “what is happening” but very little in the way of why these decisions were made by the characters. For a slow – but steady – film it somehow feels hurried and rushed when it comes to actual depth of reason. Ada has conversations with family members back home that feel like they should move us, but it is not always the case. Her story just feels, “there.”

Angèle (Ella Rumpf) is a makeup artist, wanna be writer, who again we meet and get a sense of her desires but with no real tangible moment to hang our feelings on. None of these issues are the result of poor performances. All involved deliver with conviction. What is lacking is our ability as an audience to engage fully. Maxine is the only one we truly are moved by due to the elevation of her story arc. But even those feeling are just in those moments and do not carry scene to scene.

Paris fashion week could be a character all its own. Here we get a tiny glimpse into that world but even less than an episode of Project Runway gives us. There are scenes of the pinnacle dress being made and the stress around that, but again, we are left with just a nod to it. There is too much we have to assume and fill in on our own. Even the final scene is one of assumed metaphors with no tie in to anything we saw before. It feels tragic but no one seems bothered by it. Way too disjointed to leave us satisfied.

I am a fan of everyone tied to this project and I do not want my review to sound like just a mean tweet. But I also feel like there was too much left on the cutting room floor and the wow factor never appeared.

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Matt Mungle

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