‘Couture’ review: Angelina Jolie is a tour de force in Alice Winocour’s Paris fashion drama

Dir: Alice Winocour. US/France. 2025. 106mins

Alice Winocour’s captivating fashion drama Couture is a quiet, observational picture about creative women finding solace in one another. The film stars Angelina Jolie as Maxine Walker, a film director who is making a vampire short for Paris Fashion Week when she learns that she has cancer. As she grapples with the difficult news, Couture also reveals the stories of  two other women: nervous South Sudanese model Ada (Anyier Anei) and writerly makeup artist Angèle (Ella Rumpf), whose respective artistic struggles form a dreamlike mosaic that’s as intricate as lace.

Jolie seems to bend the picture around her 

Premiering at Toronto before moving on to San Sebastian, the film should draw the interest of Jolie’s fans; she conjures the same bewitching mystique and raw poignancy that shot her to stardom. It also has the potential to bring the French auteur Winocour (Mustang, Prozima) to the attention of wider arthouse audiences.

In some ways, Couture is a continuation of writer/director Winocour’s recent interests. Similar to 2022’s Paris, Memories, which concerned an amnesiac woman trying to remember the terror attack that scarred her, Maxine is also searching to discover what’s wrong with her. When Maxine lands in Paris, wearing a badass black leather trenchcoat, she receives an urgent call from her doctor instructing her to seek a consultation appointment with his colleague (Vincent Lindon, who previously starred in Winocour’s Augustine). In the meantime, Maxine preps for her shoot with her cinematographer Anton (Louis Garrel), who oscillates between being supportive and defiant.  

Like Winocour’s Proxima, this film is also about women pushing against abrasive men. Just as Proxima follows a woman balancing motherhood with work, here Maxine must go up against her ex-husband just to speak with her daughter on the phone. The star of Maxine’s vampire film is Ada, an 18-year-old pharmaceutical student from Nairobi. Though she will walk in fashion week as well as strarring in the short, she has not told her disapproving father about her modeling career. The inexperienced Ada also struggles to fit in with the other models, particularly one hailing from Ukraine. The only kindness she receives is from make-up artist Angèle, whose male editor has recently dismissed her fiction writing about the fashion world as inauthentic and uninteresting. 

Fascinatingly, it’s not always clear whose reality we’re experiencing. Because we’re jumping from perspective to perspective, and Angèle often reads her work aloud while writing, there is the slight possibility that we are within Angèle’s fictional world. The only moments that might undermine that interpretation are the detailed scenes of a seamstress diligently stitching together Ada’s elegant white ensemble. In these moments, the measurement of women’s bodies speaks to how the world weighs and evaluates female existence. These instances are mirrored when Maxine is marked up with a pink sharpie for her examination, and in the racially charged images of measuring tape being wrapped around Ada’s ankles, wrists and neck. 

The form of Couture is as evasive as its protagonist. When we want to see more of Maxine, the action moves to Ada; when we become familiar with Ada, we’re suddenly thrust into Angèle’s world. Winocour’s film never offers easy emotion. It challenges us by restricting the angst, the fear and the hardships of these women to their interiors, requiring a great deal from each performance.

While a the complimentary approaches of a fierce Rumpf and a tranquil Anei add to the film’s unpredictability, Jolie seems to bend the picture around her. Jolie has spoken out about her own family history of cancer, and she brings that personal experience to what might be the most vulnerable performance of her career.

Winocour finally allows the frenzy to take hold during a bravura finale that turns a resplendent fashion show into a stormy, windswept gothic spectacle. The action slows to the speed of growing moss as though we’re watching a commercial for a new hot brand and the organ kicks up, alleviating the pressure these women feel to conform so they might be judged on their own terms.