Ten years after By the Sea featured now-divorced Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt acting out a version of their real-life relationship, the actress once again takes inspiration from her own biography for the new drama Couture, which had its world premiere at the 50th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival. Written and directed by Alice Winocour, the film stars Jolie as Maxine, a famous filmmaker on assignment at Paris Fashion Week when she learns that she has breast cancer and has to decide whether to put her professional ambitions on hold to pursue treatment.
In 2013, the Oscar-winning star of films like Girl, Interrupted, Changeling, and Maleficent and took her own steps to avoid a battle with cancer, undergoing a double mastectomy as a preventative measure against her family history with the disease. That clearly contextualizes and underlines her performance in Couture, and early reviews have deservedly singled out Jolie for praise. “Angelina Jolie is a tour de force,” proclaims the headline of Screen Daily‘s review, written by Robert Daniels.
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“Jolie seems to bend the picture around her,” Daniels writes in his review, going on to note the real-life connection to her character. “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.”
While Jolie is at the center of Couture, Winocour has also structured the movie as a loose ensemble piece, featuring branching narratives following a model named Ava (Anyier Anei) that’s new on the scene, as well as makeup artist Angèle (Fella Rumpf) who is trying to pivot to a writing career. While those narratives have several dramatically potent moments, most critics seem to feel that they aren’t woven effectively into Jolie’s personal story.
“Jolie … gives a vivid performance, endowing Maxine with cool-director verve and then a fear and sorrow we can’t help but respond to,” writes Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman. “Yet it never feels like the health-crisis movie and the portrait-of-the-fashion-world movie entirely go together. That’s supposed to be the point — that a crisis like this one can happen when we least expect it. But if “Couture” were more intricately about couture, it might have been more distinctive and more memorable. It shows us the surfaces of a fashion world that we often think of as all surface.”
“Jolie’s transfixing screen presence alone makes Maxine hold our attention in a way that the other characters seldom do,” agrees The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney, who proved similarly underwhelmed by the other storylines. “Couture plays almost like a joyless mood-piece response to Robert Altman’s Fashion Week satire, Prêt-à-Porter, which interwove a more expansive gallery of characters into the frantic haute couture circus. Neither Ada nor Angèle’s scenes serve as counterpoints to the more urgent drama facing Maxine, merely making the movie feel unbalanced and disjointed.”
Writing in IndieWire, Richard Lawson damns the overall movie as “leaden,” but has positive words for its star. “Jolie nonetheless manages to bring some palpable life to the role, complicating her otherworldly magnetism with a dawning dread and sorrow,” he notes. “She’s particularly effective — and even funny — in scenes with Louis Garrel, who plays Maxine’s cinematographer and possible love interest with understated sex appeal. … She sharply illustrates the desperation and loneliness that are driving Maxine into the arms of her colleague, the sense that she may be saying goodbye to a certain facet of herself as she is whisked off into the realm of disease and treatment.”
Couture arrived in Toronto seeking a distributor and while the first wave of reviews are decidedly mixed, the continued fascination around Jolie — and her strong central performance — could very well attract a buyer eager to assist the on her path to a third Oscar nomination
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