In “Couture,” Angelina Jolie plays Maxine, a director of a low-budget horror film. Maxine is a single mother who is in the midst of a divorce after being diagnosed with serious breast cancer while juggling a film request from a French luxury fashion brand.
“Couture” writer and director Alice Winocour said she wrote the French-English drama with Oscar winners in mind.
“I needed someone special. I needed someone who had a special connection to this story,” Winokur says. “Angelina has a lot in common with this character. She’s also a director, and she’s been through this without cancer, but everyone knows her story. So we felt this was for her.”
The film reflects some of Jolie’s real-life experiences. Although Jolie has never been diagnosed with cancer like Maxine, she revealed in a New York Times op-ed that she had a preventive double mastectomy because she carries the BRCA1 gene, which dramatically increases the risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. Jolie’s mother was only 56 years old when she died of ovarian cancer. She also lost her grandmother to illness.
“What I loved about Angelina was that she had this kind of punk spirit, punk energy, raw energy, and that was what I really wanted for this movie,” Winocour says.
I’m talking with Winocour and Jolie on Zoom.
I ask Jolie if she considers herself a punk. “I think I’m more punk now,” she says. “Certainly there’s an energy to it, but it’s also kind of a retrograde movement to a lot of the things that are going on. So sometimes my privacy is compromised and I’m not even fully included in a lot of things and movements. If the world is the way it is right now, sometimes I’d be less active and more private, but it’s just the opposite.”
But then Jolie hinted at her personal life and hinted at her messy divorce from Brad Pitt.
“I feel like my fighting spirit is finally coming back,” she says. “I lost it for a little while. I was a little depressed, but I’m starting to get it back, mainly because my kids, who are now older, encouraged me to do that.”
She further explains: “My kids are almost all 18, so now they see me traveling around the world and they want me to go out and do things. They know me better than anyone, and they still like me, and that really shows. I think they’re really encouraging me to get back to a side of myself that I probably didn’t feel as free in.”
In fact, before she split from Pitt, Jolie had decided she was done with acting. “Before I got divorced, I was thinking about quitting acting,” she says. “I was focused on directing, and I was thinking of doing some international work. But all of a sudden, the only way to be more at home, to be away from home for short periods of time, and to make some serious money, was to go back to acting. I only had things that were short, close, or that I could take (the kids) with.”
Alice Winocour and Angelina Jolie attended a special screening of Couture at the Whitby Hotel in New York City on June 16th.
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“Couture” is an ensemble piece co-starring makeup artist and aspiring writer Ella Lumpu and South Sudanese model Asnière Anei, who plays the role of a new model visiting Paris for the first time, starring in Maxine’s fashion film. All three women find themselves meeting each other at pivotal and extremely vulnerable times in their lives. “We are stronger together,” says Winokour. “This film is also about unity and women exposing their scars, sometimes telling strangers their most personal things…What we wanted to show was this fragile moment between humans.”
The film’s original title was “Ride or Die,” Winocour says. “It’s about the spirit of survival,” she says. “The world is so difficult. It’s like, let’s celebrate life together. You see all the scars behind the perfect image, but it’s people connecting with each other and sharing something together.”
In one scene, a doctor outlines the incision lines on Maxine’s bare chest in red ink before undergoing a double mastectomy. Jolie said Vincent Lyndon, who played the physician, was so convincing that she felt like she was with a real doctor. “As a patient and as a woman, I wanted to lean into him and ask, ‘Are you okay?'”
The sight brought back memories of her own health journey. “It’s so humbling to realize that, as[the doctor]says in the movie, we’re all going to die someday and we’re not going to be here forever,” Jolie says. “I lost my mother at a young age, and I never met my grandmother, so I don’t think I ever felt like I had a long life to live. I’m already past the age when my mother was diagnosed. I may be suffering because I feel like I have to rush because time is running out and I can’t live in the moment.”
“I’m preparing my children for my absence, but I’m not really preparing them for being a grandmother,” she continues. “This is what happens when you think of death as a reality.”
“Couture” will be released on June 26th.
