Fashion is a serious company. It makes people billions of dollars a year, it affects culture in countless open and subliminal ways. But when covered by filmThis Haute world is usually spit, in sophisticated satires such as Robert Altman’s “Pret-A-Porter” and absurdist comedies such as “Zoolander.” Credit to French director Alice Winocour, then that she is approaching her country’s perhaps most iconic industry with almost total seriousness in the new film, “Investment. “
The film, like Altman’s, is a collection of intersecting stories, all converging on an elaborate Paris Fashion Week show. Angelina Jolie Plays a woman, Maxine, who is new to the Atelier stage, an indie horror leader who flew from America to Paris to shoot a short film that will follow the models as they take to the track. Anyier Anei is ADA, a beginner model from Södra Sudan through Kenya, Eye and Hungry when she is thrown into a Melström of courty men and clubs sisters in strutting. Ella Rumpf plays a makeup artist-cum-novelist who observes this glamorous, exclusive environment with poetic separation, while Rumpf’s “raw” Costar Garance Marillier is a seamstress who accurately constructs an absolutely important garment.
Thus, we have entrance in various interesting sectors in the industry, through which we should get a thorough, enlightening portrait of process, pride and pressure. But Winocour – whose career fascinating has revered from the thriller “disturbance” To Sci-Fi “Proxima” to the traum drama “Paris Memories”-is ultimately more interested in mood than explanations. We learn some things like the threads in “Couture” Ospool, but most of us are intended to feel a kind of large melancholy wonder about this swirling of human activity.
Sometimes such a feeling is achieved, especially in the climate track, when a rainstorm whips up and the epiphaves are experienced. Winocour is a tasteful stylist who uses Filip Leyman and Anna von Hausswolff’s atmospheric points to further raise her already many moving pictures. There are quieter, subtle moments of beauty as well: a model that takes a champagne bottle from an ice bucket and replaces it with its swollen feet, a film director who admires the red of false blood in a movie, an airport goodbye between two young fellow travelers from various war life. Winocour clearly has a deep care for its characters, and for the often malignant or misunderstood women who work away in this still-very-controlled industry.
The effort is admirable. However, the overall construction of “couture” is uneven and bad. The crossing stories should allow Winocour to explore, and yet she does not do much with the opportunity. Most of the characters are given plotlines so weak that they are barely detected. Ada talks to her mother and brother back in Kenya, worrying about a rolled ankle, parties with her new friends. Angèle, the makeup artist, goes from gig to play and participates in brief and rarely very meaningful small talk with the one around. (It may be a close approach of the job, but it is not very cinematic.) Seam East works on the dress and then works on it a little more, and then she ends it. That’s pretty much that.
The naturalistic, LO-Fi method may play well was Maxin who did not sadd up with a heavy, thudding cancer arch. She has done some tests before her Paris trip, and a phone call warns her to bad news. This gives Jolie the chance to share some scenes with the large Vincent Lindon as a worried doctor, but otherwise her intrigue is sadly light on details, to everything that can define Maxine’s special reaction to this terrible news. Jolie has said in interviews that Maxine’s diagnosis was partly inspired by a health issue in her past, so there is something personal at work in the film. But Winocour does not do enough to give shading and structure to Maxine’s incredibly generic journey.
Jolie still manages to bring some tangible life to the role and complicate her other world magnetism with a dawn fear and sadness. She is particularly effective – and even funny – in scenes with Louis Garrel, who plays Maxine’s cinematographer and possibly love interest with discreet sex appeal. Jolie is of course a champion in flirting and seductive on the camera, but she does not do it on autopilot. She sharply illustrates the desperation and loneliness that drives Maxin in the arms of her colleague, the feeling that she may say goodbye to a certain aspect of herself when she is whispered into the disease and treatment.
That is, why you ask a movie star like Jolie to join the ensemble. If only Winocour gave her more shade to play with. And if only the rest of “couture” did not feel so incorrect with Maxine’s fight. As it is, the film is somehow looking and melodramatic, a strange and overwhelming cocktail by Blasé Euro Sleankness and TV movie drama. Ah yes. At least the clothes are nice.
Rating: c
“Couture” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2025. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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