Nothing is more intense than beauty when it insists on being perfect. This is the thought that strikes us when watching the first glimpses of Coutures, the new film by Alice Winocour. Here, fashion becomes a battlefield. Illness is not a melodramatic sentence, but a detonator. Everything erupts beneath the polished surface of Paris Fashion Week, where the female body is displayed, corrected, celebrated—and, at the same time, consumed. At the center is Maxine, a successful American director, who, just as Paris races toward the next collection, receives a diagnosis that forces her to stop. She is portrayed by Angelina Jolie in one of the most stripped-down and controlled performances of her career. A woman who suddenly feels her body becoming unstable ground. Winocour is razor-sharp in depicting this fierce paradox: when life is threatened, every detail becomes more vivid. Sounds, faces, even the artificial lights of the runways seem to pulse.
The true insight of the film, however, is that Maxine is never left alone. By her side moves Ada, a young South Sudanese model who has come to Europe to support her family. Her gaze is that of someone who, alone, does not yet belong anywhere. Anyier Anei—whose own biography resonates intimately with that of her character—brings to the screen a concrete fragility, never aestheticized. Ada is a girl learning to walk in heels while trying not to lose herself. The film follows her in the suspended spaces between one fashion show and the next. These are the places where fashion ceases to be spectacle and becomes work, waiting, solitude.
“What I found most beautiful in the film is how it shows the way we face challenges. Every viewer can see themselves in it. There is inevitably a moment in life when we doubt our ability to overcome a difficulty: we can either collapse under it or move forward. In many ways, then, this film is about life. It is not a story about the end, but a deeply human tale about the courage to keep living fully, despite everything.”
Then there is Angèle, the makeup artist played by Ella Rumpf. She is the emotional glue. She paints faces, conceals dark circles, smooths imperfections. She dreams of another life, perhaps even another language. Her voice, which gradually asserts itself as the narrator, belongs to someone who has understood that identity is not a fixed mask, but a continuous process of rewriting. The title Coutures is a poetic statement. The seams are those of the garments, of course—and the film truly takes us through Chanel’s ateliers, with their monumental staircases and the skilled hands shaping fabric—but above all, they are the sutures of bodies and of stories. A surgeon tracing lines across a patient’s chest is not so far removed from a seamstress sketching a hem. In both cases, one intervenes upon living matter, a connection so powerful that it carries multiple messages at once. In both, there is an attempt to shape time itself. Winocour dwells on this tension between control and loss. Fashion races against obsolescence: one season erases the next. Illness, on the other hand, imposes a countdown that cannot be ignored. Maxine realizes that her existence “hangs by a thread,” just as everything around her speaks of appearance and lightness. It is a confrontation that is both brutal and breathtaking.
In an already so overwhelming story, love makes its entrance. The character played by Louis Garrel is a man who observes without intruding, who desires without mercy. Choosing to explore desire amid illness is perhaps the film’s boldest gesture. Too often, cinema confronted with cancer takes the path of sacrifice and moralized sorrow. Here, however, the body remains alive, sensual, claimed. What strikes most profoundly is the form of solidarity that emerges among the three women at the heart of the story. Each, in her own way, is striving to reclaim control over her body: the model offering it to the marketplace, the director at risk of losing part of it, the makeup artist reshaping it; different ages, different battles, yet the same urgency: to survive without ever giving up the right to choose.
“After watching Coutures, I found it deeply enjoyable to be inside the minds of these three women, Maxine, Ada, and Angèle—and even more so if we include Alice, making it four. Yes, I loved immersing myself in their world and their thoughts.”
The final storm, almost apocalyptic, does not feel like an ending, but rather an act of metamorphosis. To destroy in order to rewrite. To unravel in order to sew back stronger. Coutures is not a film about the end. It is a film about resilience. About the possibility of feeling, paradoxically, more alive when everything is shaking. Alice Winocour stirs the fabric, reveals the seams, lets the scar show through. And she tells us how strength dwells in exposed fragility.
For further information Pathefilms.com.
