In “Couture,” Angelina Jolie rethinks aging onscreen

The French aren’t exactly famous for their warmth. Likewise, Paris Fashion Week isn’t known to feature designers whose collections can be worn off the rack, instead showcasing works of great sartorial ambition, with severe silhouettes and playful flourishes alike. Yet somehow, French writer-director Alice Winocour’s new film, “Couture,” which follows four women whose lives intersect during Paris Fashion Week, cuts through the austerity with all the precision and grace of a pair of fabric shears. Winocour’s filmmaking itself is as steely as a Parisian’s gaze after you order the last croissant à la pâtisserie. But something special happens when her simple yet stylish camera meets the gaze of her star, Angelina Jolie. The gray skies part, the clouds lift and a warm maternal comfort spreads across the film, creeping in like the sun’s rays falling on cobblestones still shining from a sudden downpour.

Don’t be mistaken: “Couture” is not a happy film, at least not in the traditional sense. There is no tidy ending, or even a sense that everything will be alright. But Winocour finds calm hidden beneath the unrest, a moment to pause and breathe, just to feel alive as life forges on without our consent. “Couture” is a film of grief and gratitude, and how the two feelings have more in common than we understand. They spring from the same place and push us to similarly exaggerated states. When experiencing either emotion, everything — be it a piece of news, the prick of a finger, a conversation with a loved one living thousands of miles away — is magnified.

As Maxine, an American director who’s traveled to Paris to complete a short film that will play before a high-concept fashion show in the coming days, Jolie elegantly moves between these two sensations. This is the last project Maxine is doing before starting production on the movie she’s been hoping to make her entire career. The short film will pay just enough money to live comfortably in the chaos of her upcoming indie production. Maxine glides along, bathed in gratitude, making assured artistic decisions and certain that she is on the precipice of something that will change her life forever. Sure enough, she is.

But the life-altering event comes not in the form of fulfilling her life’s dream, but as an unexpected cancer diagnosis, handed to her just as she’s scheduled to wrap production on her short. There’s the grief, seeping into Maxine’s life and twisting itself around the gratitude, tightening its grip. Destabilized but determined to finish her current work, Maxine spends the remainder of her time in Paris between the set, her hotel room and her doctor’s appointments, weighing her options and trying to reconcile her new reality with logic and poise that’s quickly running dry.

Jolie herself has met impasses like this her entire life, and it’s that air of empathy that makes “Couture” so disarmingly intimate. This is clearly a deeply personal film for her, and her performance is quite unlike any other she’s given. Jolie’s work is bold, and almost imperceptibly so, quietly channeling a part of herself that is entirely removed from the veneer of fame and celebrity. In Winocour’s peek behind the curtain of the fashion industry, there is no artifice, no magazine coverline that says “Angelina Jolie: Fabulous at 50!” sandwiched next to blurbs about anti-aging procedures and dressing to hide your arms. Together, “Couture” and Jolie confront the true realities of aging that have nothing to do with masking and everything to do with being as open and candid as possible.

The film is, in a way, a cinematic continuation of all of the real-life work Jolie has done to stress the importance of breast cancer screenings and genetic testing. In 2013, Jolie had a preventative double mastectomy after learning that her chance of developing breast cancer was extremely high due to an inherited mutation in the BRCA gene. Jolie’s mother had breast cancer and died of ovarian cancer, and her aunt, who had the same BRCA1 gene defect as Jolie, died of breast cancer three months after Jolie’s operation.

And although Jolie has been incredibly outspoken about her medical journey, “Couture” adds an exceptional new layer to the work she’s already done. As many times as a person can be told to get tested, have regular checkups, and manage their health, cinema has a way of conveying the urgency of the things that we tell ourselves we can keep putting off. Admittedly, after watching the film, I booked a physical I’ve been delaying for far too long. (That and my mom took care to remind me recently, too — hi, mom.)

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What could easily look like an updated version of Agnès Varda’s “Cléo from 5 to 7” — or the Sarah Jessica Parker-starring homage, 2018’s “Here and Now” (don’t watch this) — is rounded out into something all its own by Winocour’s three other women. There’s Ada (Anyier Anei), a South Sudanese model who has booked her first fashion gig starring in Maxine’s film and opening the fashion show; Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a harried makeup artist with dreams of writing a novel about her experiences in the industry; and Christine (Garance Marillier), the seamstress tasked with sewing the gown Ada will wear in the show.

Winocour wisely places all of her protagonists in different fields within the same industry, and at different points in their careers. Ada is facing a make-or-break debut and struggling with a homesickness that seems to outweigh her desire to model. Christine is only slightly more experienced, no longer an atelier apprentice, but is just beginning to prove herself, constructing her first garment entirely on her own. And Angèle is talented and well-known in Parisian beauty circles, but is beginning to feel that her canvas is the bare page, not a model’s bare face.

As the days progress, and Maxine, Angèle, Ada and Christine cross paths in one way or another, they each experience a similar existential conundrum, with no one to guide them toward the right choice but themselves. Winocour’s pacing is languid, but never boring. She’s impeccably talented at conveying feeling without too much dialogue, and all of her actors are game to meet her simplicity, relying on facial expressions and body language to tell a story that can only be understood in the mind. No matter how much we talk about the things that we’re trying to work through, asking our friends or our family or our pets what we should do, the final choice will always be ours.

(Vertical Entertainment) Angelina Jolie and Louis Garrel in “Couture”

Watching Maxine ponder her options is particularly affecting, especially in the moments when she tries — and sometimes fails — to reach her daughter, Eden, over the phone. Eden is back in New York, dealing with the effects of an ongoing divorce between her mother and father. There are moments when, with no other actor visible, Jolie speaks to Eden over the phone with such a heartbreaking, beautiful cadence and tenderness that it’s as if you’re watching her break character and speak to her own children. Call it a stretch, call it being good at your job, but it’s difficult to deny how much of Jolie is embedded within the screenplay. Maxine is, after all, also an artist, trying to preserve her relationship with her children while going through a divorce, contemplating just how honest to be as she works through her mind’s frenzied state. It’s as good as Jolie playing herself, and it’s that touching, too.

But there is one moment that made me inadvertently laugh, not long after Maxine receives her diagnosis. Sitting in the waiting room, mentally preparing for an MRI, Maxine opens a browser and searches, “BREAST CANCER.” I was instantly reminded of a hokey moment in “Gossip Girl,” when a character gets word of a similar diagnosis and takes to Bing (of all search engines!) to search, simply, “cancer.” Initially, this shot in “Couture” gave me a chuckle and took me out of the film. But to their credit, Winocour and Jolie pulled me right back in. Maxine thumbs through the image results, past 3D medical renderings and images of bare breasts, finding nothing to calm her nerves. Maybe she doesn’t know what she’s looking for, or where to start. Perhaps there isn’t a starting point so much as a continuation, marching forward through life, grappling with the unexpected events that occur, and all the complicated feelings that come with them.