Angelina Jolie admits to the filming “couture” where she is “tight”;
The Oscar winner is a French and English ensemble by writer director Alice Winocourt, starring Maxine Walker, a director of low-budget horror films that are commissioned by French fashion houses to direct the film for the Paris Fashion Week runway show.
When Maxine’s balance works and motherhood and her ongoing divorce proceedings work, she learns she has an aggressive form of breast cancer. “I feel like it’s a very personal film,” Jolie tells me from London ahead of the film’s world premiere at TIFF. “In my mind, it’s one film that probably doesn’t feel like a movie.”
“Couture” is neither a documentary nor a biopic, but the drama reflects Jolie’s own journey of health. In 2013, she revealed in the New York Times Op-Ed that she underwent a prophylactic double mastectomy for carrying the BRCA1 gene. Jolie’s mother was 56 years old when she died of ovarian cancer. She also lost her grandmother to illness.
Winocour says he had Jolie in mind when writing the script. “I knew she was connected to the story,” Winocour says. “I wanted to work with her for a long time. I thought it was funny to show her vulnerability and the woman behind the icon. What I like about Angelina is that she is in the Hollywood system, but at the same time, she is kind of a rebel and a rebel of the authorities.”
In one of the film’s most emotional scenes, Maxine advises that she undergo a double mastectomy, not only because she has cancer, but also because the illness is very advanced. In another case, the doctor has been shown to outline a surgical incision line containing red ink on Maxine’s bare chest.
“Of course, it’s going to nurture a lot of personal stuff,” Jolie says. “But I always tend to have the heaviest films with the most loving sets. There’s a lot of comfort to have real conversations and having a shared community and real feelings. Looking at the other faces of the people on the set, it was very soothing in many ways, as many people have cancer.
“You realize that life is vulnerable and time moves quickly, and people die when they can’t imagine that there is no world. That’s not a singular experience,” she continues. “It’s hard to not feel very close to the crew or other actors in this kind of production.”
Jolie also sought comfort by wearing one of her mother’s necklaces in the film. “I felt very vulnerable,” she says.
But then she laughs and adds, “I was nervous about speaking French too.”
According to Winocour, Jolie learned to speak French for the film. “She really immersed herself in that part and was more obsessed with the idea of speaking French than I do,” recalls Winocour. “Her mother was French so there was a lot of very intimate stuff. She was really dedicated to film.”
Maxine’s efforts to stay alive after learning and finding out that she resonated with Jolie. “We don’t know how to live it, how it exists through it, how it is not defined by it,” she says. “But there is also the vitality that comes when you decide to move forward with life in the face of it.
Maxine is one third of the film’s storyline. “Couture” is a true ensemble, a story about a make-up artist (Ella Lampf), who dreams of being a writer, and Ada, a new model who travels to Paris after being discovered in South Sudan.
South Sudanese model Anyier Anei will make her acting debut as an ADA. Annay says she “she felt fraud syndrome immediately” when she was offered the role, but Jolie helped her overcome her nerves and worries. “My country has been at war since I was born, and I think Angelina Jolie is always one of the few activists and humanitarians who talk about what’s really going on in South Sudan,” says Annay. “So it was a real honor to meet her on the first day. It was an incredible experience because I had to learn from her. She was so kind and she was very patient. We talked about Sudan in our first conversation.
Any Anei of Ella Lampf and “Couture.”
Carol Betuel
Winocour asked Anei not to take acting lessons before she began filming. “She said I wanted to be as natural as I did, and that taking school or classes would take away naturalness from what she was looking for and what she saw during casting,” Annay says.
Like stitches holding pieces of couture together, all three main characters are screwed together by the fashion world. Each of them is trying to understand what they want and what they need to survive. “To me, it’s as if these three women were one woman of different ages, one woman in her 20s and the other Angelina in her 30s and 40s,” Winocour said.
“It’s about women’s bodies and lives, and the impact we have on each other,” says Jolie. “I think there’s something that moves me. We come from different places and we’re sewn into this humanity, in this case, these women’s sisterhood.”
“Couture” also came when Chanel allowed him to film fictional films in his Paris showroom and studio.
“They let me go all behind the scenes of their shows to meet the Atelier tailors, a fashion worker,” Winocour says. “In most fashion films, that’s usually from the perspective of an artistic director who is mostly male. I thought it was very interesting to have a female perspective and a working-class hero.”
As a model, Annay walked for Chanel, Dior, Fendi, Versace, Saint Laurent and Gucci, appearing in the Balmain and Road campaigns. “When you hear fashion, you think about money, think about glory, think about beauty, but it’s the people behind you who put those stitches together, and the people who work behind the scenes that put fashion together, that really brings fashion,” she says. “That’s really the foundation of fashion.”
