In Angelina Jolie’s Couture, the Metatextual Is the Star

In the late 1960s, the luxury mink-fur brand Blackglama started an ad campaign I think of often. It featured the boldest of divas — including Barbra Streisand, Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall, and Elizabeth Taylor — in Blackglama’s extravagant fur with the tagline hanging above their incandescent eyes: “What becomes a legend most?” The grammatically questionable line has the frisson of intrigue and awe. Angelina Jolie — the 51-year-old activist, mother, and actor — is seen above all else in the public as a star and sex symbol whose reputation enters the room before she does. She’d fit into the Blackglama ads easily. 

Her stardom has a gravitational effect. It often warps how her work is received — like it did with her tremendous (and critically panned) directorial effort 2015’s By the Sea, in which Jolie’s camera gazes upon herself with a care and complexity never before seen in her career. Other times, it disrupts how her personal life is talked about, like the uncharitable way the public has talked about her motives in her divorce with Brad Pitt and the stunning allegations of abuse stemming from a 2016 incident in which Pitt reportedly choked at least one of his children and physically and emotionally intimidated Jolie. The reputation and histories of a star are intimately wedded to how we interpret their work onscreen. In Jolie’s latest film — written and directed by French filmmaker Alice Winocour — the metatextual dimensions of Jolie’s visage are as much the star of the film as she is as an actor.

Couture is a film of gentle countenance. Jolie plays Maxine Walker, an independent filmmaker in Paris for Fashion Week crafting a horror short film for a fashion house that will play before its runway show. Pushed to describe fashion in two words with a wry glint in her eyes, she says it is “useless and necessary.” Fluttering effortlessly between French and English, Maxine is a woman beset by having to find a tricksy balance between her artistic desires and, to quote Bette Davis’s Margo Channing in 1950’s All About Eve, the business of being a woman. She navigates disagreements with the short film’s cinematographer, Anton (Louis Garrel, a touch too sedate), and the fashion house funding this endeavor. She fields calls from her soon-to-be-ex-husband whose animosity is evident when he says, “You aren’t the center of the world.” Financial pressures abound for Maxine. Then she gets a troubling call from her doctor in Los Angeles about biopsy results. Later, in person, Dr. Hansen (the always striking Vincent Lindon) tells her what her L.A.-based doctor was too reticent to do over the phone: “You’re young. You have cancer. We must act quickly.” Jolie’s face cracks with the realization of this truth before it quivers under the magnitude of it. The teariness and shock that follows got under my skin. Oh, how lonely it is recognizing the ways your own body can betray you. It’s difficult to not think of Jolie’s own history, if you’re aware of it: Her mother died after a yearslong battle with ovarian and breast cancer in 2007 at only 56 years old. Jolie tested positive for the BRCA1 gene that demonstrates a high likelihood of breast-cancer diagnosis, leading her to the decision to have a double mastectomy as well as the complete removal of her ovaries and Fallopian tubes.

While the metatextual is an intriguing current in Couture, its waters run deeper than that. Winocour’s script also delves into the lives of other women in this swath of the fashion world. There’s the empathetic makeup artist Angèle (Ella Rumpf), who deals with gossiping men at work while trying to spark a career as a writer. Her voice-over stitches together various women’s stories as she pulls from her experiences and the lives of those she crosses paths with for her writing. There’s the young designer/seamstress Christine (played by the lead of Raw, Garance Marillier). And then there’s Ada (Anyier Anei), the 18-year-old model fresh to Paris and the industry, struggling to summon the confidence necessary to do what’s asked of her. The stories of Christine and Angèle feel notably thinly drawn compared to Ada’s journey.

Born in South Sudan, Ada’s family moved to Kenya in the wake of the war. She wanted to go to school to become a pharmacist, which her father forbade her from continuing. But after getting scouted outside of school, she has taken to modeling, with her brother and mother’s blessing. Her father is none the wiser. As with Maxine, Ada’s history is communicated through dialogue, wistful gazes, and tense phone calls with the people close to her heart, but not in her physical presence. I was especially impressed by Anei’s performance. Her face is akin to looking at the bottom of a bejeweled bowl full of clear, crisp water. Every shift in light and emotion at the bottom is evident, as if you’re seeing through the flesh to witness something more powerful: the soul. Jolie’s performance is similarly transfixing. Each minute gesture and crack in her facial expression opens up new worlds of connection. Maxine builds a surprising rapport with Anton that shifts from professionally antagonistic to emotionally warm and sexually charged thanks to a proposition she makes at a bar that leads to a kiss. The film tangles with the startling synchronicities of life in which loss and growth are bound together, and the people you meet in passing have a surprisingly profound effect on the course of your story. Sometimes the care you need comes from the most unlikely of sources. 

Consider the touching, brief scene between Maxine and a woman who looks to be in her 60s in the doctor’s office as they wait to be called in for their respective MRIs. The woman recounts throwing a party celebrating her life after the cancer diagnosis that now impedes her future. For a fleeting moment, she and Maxine hold hands and gaze into one another’s eyes with a sense of quiet understanding. This is the strength that can be found in even a passing human connection with someone you may never see again. 

Winocour’s decision to dip in and out of the lives of these very different women creates a bricolage of creative desire and personal complications. The hard work of these women keeps the fashion industry running despite the troublesome forces they must contend with in order to make their creative visions a reality, whether it’s a cancer diagnosis or the nitpicking cruelty of the men in their creative orbit. It is exceedingly rare to watch films that care about the interior lives and exterior narratives older women must make sense of in the manner Couture handles Maxine’s story. It’s even rarer to watch films that depict women along cross-cultural and cross-generational lines that urge us to take the prosaic nature of life seriously. It would be easy to look at Couture as slight. But its observational curiosity hones in on the tender qualities of day-to-day life, where emotionally ground-shaking revelations sit next to the mundane. But there’s no time to waste dwelling on the wanting rather than the living required of us. After all, there’s always work to do.

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