‘Couture’ with Angelina Jolie is about the “fragility of life”, says director Alice Winocour

The title of Alice Winocour’s Couture, which has its world premiere at TIFF in Special Presentations, is spelled Coutures with an ‘s’ in the filmmaker’s native France, where it means ‘stitches’ as applied to both fashion and medicine. The film fluctuates between the worlds of haute couture and hospitals as its heroine, US film director Maxine (Angelina Jolie), learns she has breast cancer just as she arrives in Paris to prepare a fashion show.

Couture weaves together story­lines of women of different ages and nationalities, including newcomer Anyier Anei as a Sudanese fashion model and French actress Ella Rumpf as an ambitious make-up artist. Louis Garrel and Vincent Lindon also star in the US-France co-production, which is produced by Charles Gillibert of CG Cinema, Zhang Xin and William Horberg of Closer Media, and Jolie.

HanWay Films is co-repping international sales with UTA Independent Film Group, with the latter also selling North American rights. Pathé will release it in France. Winocour was last at TIFF with Paris Memories in 2022, and before that with Proxima in 2019, which won an honourable mention in Platform.

Winocour talks to Screen about working with Angelina Jolie, colloborating with Chanel and giving women a voice. 

What was your initial way into this story?

I’d often seen young Ukrainian and Sudanese models who came to Paris for fashion week and they seemed totally lost. I wanted to tell the story of women torn between two radically contrasting worlds, between war or trauma and the glamorous world of fashion. I’ve always been interested in traumatised bodies, and this led me to create the character of Maxine, who learns she has cancer in the middle of the craze of fashion week. I wanted to show what goes on beyond the beauty of the clothes and the models, and give these women a voice.

How did you navigate the two very different worlds of haute couture and medicine?

I once met a surgeon who told me that when he operated, he felt like he was sewing. He told me, “I perform haute couture for bodies.” The two worlds are far apart, but both of them deal with women’s bodies. The red lines on the dress drawn by the seamstresses echo the red lines that the doctor traces on Maxine’s body before the operation.

Chanel not only financed the project, but Couture was shot at the fashion house’s Paris atelier. How was it to work with the company? 

We had the complete support of Chanel. It was important to me to show the reality of a real fashion house. Thanks to them, I had the opportunity to go backstage at the fashion shows. They opened their doors and let us film scenes inside their atelier, and show their mythical staircase. Chanel also agreed that we wouldn’t show their logo anywhere.

Did you have Angelina Jolie in mind to play Maxine from the beginning?

It was important to me to work with someone who had been directly affected by breast cancer. Angelina’s mother and grandmother died of the disease and she had a double mastectomy herself to avoid the same fate. I wanted to show the woman behind the actress and the icon. She has managed to remain a star in Hollywood, yet also remain authentic and step out of the mould, assume her difference and, in many ways, revolt. I’m happy people will discover her intimacy behind the media noise — more fragile and more vulnerable.

Was the role written for her?

Once the film was cast, the characters were inspired by the actresses themselves. In the film, Maxine says her mother is French because Angelina’s mother was French. The same with Anyier who, like her character, studied pharmaceutical sciences and comes from South Sudan. The make-up artist Angele is loosely based on a make-up artist I met when in Cannes presenting Paris Memories. Her name is apt as I saw her as sort of the “angel” of the film — her job is to hide these women’s bruises.

What do you hope audiences take away from the film?

What fascinated me most is this idea of ephemerality, the frantic race against time, like a desire to grasp what is already gone. All of these people working so hard for something that passes so quickly, which is also a metaphor for life and death. We feel this pulsation of life, this collective effort of people working together to create a dream and then this pulsation of death. More than anything, the film is about the solidarity of women of different generations and worlds. It’s about the fragility of life.

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