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The otherworldly beauty and consuming, tattoo-strewn look of Angelina Jolie hasn’t always allowed for a great deal of versatility as an actor, a difficult face to seamlessly slot into most stories. The star hasn’t seemed to be all that interested in acting for a while anyway (since 2012, she has physically appeared on screen just seven times) and has preferred to spend time behind the camera and focusing on both her family and her philanthropic pursuits. Her films as a director have been of both genuinely noble intention and minimal cinematic value (her last effort, Without Blood, premiered at last year’s Toronto film festival but still doesn’t have US distribution) and as she enters her 50s, it seems like she’s rediscovered her passion for acting again.
The catastrophic box office for her ill-advised entry into the Marvel universe – Chloé Zhao’s fantastically boring Eternals – has at least freed her from the hell of superhero sequels, and while last year’s Maria Callas biopic didn’t secure her the Oscar nomination it was clearly designed to, it gently pushed the star further out of the shadows, and she’s since been lining up projects with more speed than we’re used to seeing. It’s a shame she’s not picking better though – her latest effort, Couture, premiering here in Toronto and failing to work on any of the levels it is limply trying to, is a film about high fashion that’s as thin and disposable as something bought on the high street.
It’s a frustration not just because of Jolie’s involvement but because it comes from the French writer and director Alice Winocour, who was last at the festival for her specific and sensitive drama Paris Memories about a woman slowly piecing together the beats of a terrorist attack she survived. Any detail and care Winocour showed in that film, about the imprecise nature of trauma and memory, is entirely absent here, every character and insight proving far too shallow to seem real. Winocour is also clearly striving for real, with dialogue often feeling (painfully) improvised and scenes shot without an excess of artifice, as if we’re watching a documentary. But as a character at one point says: “Just because something is real, it doesn’t make it interesting.”
On paper, there’s something interestingly real about the character Jolie is playing, a director dealing with the shock of a breast cancer diagnosis, echoing what she has gone through in real life. She plays Maxine, a film-maker in the horror genre who is hired by a French fashion house to make a short that will introduce their Paris fashion week show. While in production, her doctor recommends she speak to someone locally about some concerning results. Her story is one of three strands, the others also following women involved with the same show: one is an 18-year-old model from South Sudan (Anyier Anei) who is being given her first big chance, and another is a makeup artist (Ella Rumpf) who has dreams of being a writer.
It’s all as light and inconsequential as a feather, Winocour avoiding conflict and lowering stakes, the only more conventional drama revolving around Maxine’s discovery and her journey to figuring out what she should do about it. There’s obviously something wrenching about seeing the actor in the same difficult situations we know she’s faced herself, but there’s nothing about how the scenes are written or presented that suggests anything lived-in; it’s all as oddly plain and unspecific as a TV movie. Her natural movie star charm is hard to ignore, but it’s not a performance with much depth to it, Jolie struggling to enliven a character without distinguishing idiosyncrasies and never once making us forget who it is that we are watching. Early on, she shows a lack of in fashion, dismissing it as an unnecessary distraction, but her character is, as one would expect from Jolie, effortlessly stylish from the get-go, making it a hard-to-believe assertion. She also engages in a brief fling with Louis Garrel’s handsome cinematographer but even their scenes are flat, a flirtation and sexual passion that is as dry and joyless as the rest of the film.
Jolie does get some sort of vague arc, though, which is more than can be said for the other female leads. There is potential for both – a young model working in an unfamiliar country and an unforgiving industry and an unfulfilled makeup artist whose magpie nature has her playing confidante with her clients – but Winocour can’t find a way to make the quotidian compel or for their lives to amount to much of anything when randomly viewed side by side. It’s an unsatisfying and head-scratchingly empty drama that in its final meaningless moments, as shreds of drab voiceover are matched with a dramatically overstylised rainstorm, starts to feel as creatively pointless as the sort of vapid, brand-commissioned film Jolie’s director was hired to make. It makes the fashion world seem deathly dull, as if Winocour dislikes it as much as her protagonist allegedly does.
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Couture is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released at a later date
