“Couture,” Reviewed: Angelina Jolie Faces Trouble with Style

A movie doesn’t have to be great for a viewer to wish it were longer. The new drama “Couture,” set in the Parisian high-fashion scene, is at times fairly flimsy, because its many story lines call for extended treatment but are crammed and trimmed to a mere hour and three-quarters. The title isn’t misleading, but the casting is: the star is Angelina Jolie (who’s also one of the producers), but her screen time in the movie isn’t quite commensurate with her fame. Directed by Alice Winocour, who also wrote the script with Jean-Stéphane Bron, “Couture” is a dramatic mosaic, a series of sketches portraying a varied array of women whose work goes into the creation of a runway show. Jolie plays an American film director named Maxine Walker, a specialist in female-centered horror movies, who plans to shoot a promotional film for the brand in her signature vampire-genre style and to direct the runway show with something of the same gothic mystery.

Maxine is the film’s most substantially developed character, with the most detailed backstory. She lives in Los Angeles with her teen-age daughter, she’s going through a divorce, and she’s about to shoot a feature that she has been waiting a long time to make. At the same time, her doctor back home has concerns about a recent biopsy. Soon after arriving in Paris, she’s examined by a French physician, Dr. Laurent Hansen (Vincent Lindon), who diagnoses her with breast cancer and recommends prompt surgery. The other three women all have connections to Maxine, yet she’s not involved in their most developed and personally significant scenes. There’s Ada (Anyier Anei), an eighteen-year-old South Sudanese model who’ll lead the runway lineup; Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a makeup artist who aspires to become a writer; and Christine (Garance Marillier), a seamstress whose exacting work will be displayed on the catwalk.

Ada, who’s just beginning her career, is negotiating complexities that ought to have been explored far more substantially. She has come to France after emigrating from South Sudan to Kenya to escape war, and her family remains in Kenya (where she’d been studying pharmacy). She plans to send money from modelling jobs home to her relatives, though she doesn’t dare tell her father what she’s doing to earn it. As soon as she’s cast by Maxine, the fashion house puts her up in an apartment with other models (some jealous, some indifferent, some sympathetic) and works with her to refine her raw endowment of poise, grace, and expressivity. But she isn’t paid up front, and her family’s needs are pressing, so she resorts to asking a fellow-model for a loan. Ada’s overlapping cycles of initiation and desperation are intensely dramatic, but the movie’s hectic pace leaves each of them merely encapsulated in brief onscreen action or a few lines of dialogue, left undeveloped.