QCinema International Film Festival kicked off 14 November with Alice Winocour’s French female-centric drama Couture. I went in blind, and the arthouse film, set during Paris Fashion Week, immediately captivates with its gorgeously textured aesthetic restraint and realistically nuanced performances. Like most French arthouse films, this is character-driven; an intimate character study.
So for those hoping for gloss, glamour, and Hollywood-style melodrama à la The Devil Wears Prada, this is not your thing. Couture is a more introspective piece, intent on exploring vulnerability and humanity within a high-pressure ecosystem.
But the pressures in the film are not felt — only understood. Winocour’s approach is delicate, slow, and anchored in the rhythms of emotional realism.
The problem with Couture is its lack of a singular perspective. We get three main women — a filmmaker, a model, and a makeup artist — and a fourth, a seamstress. The camera moves from one to the other, tracing their routines, slipping past their facades to give glimpses of their private worlds. But it also wanders into the POV of assorted secondary characters, thinning the narrative instead of enriching it.
Angelina Jolie plays Maxine, a filmmaker at Fashion Week to direct an opening short — a gothic horror set in a fog-shrouded forest, easily the film’s breathtakingly visual treat. Maxine’s lead actress is a rookie Sudanese model, Ada (Anyier Anei), who feels out of place as the only Black woman in the lineup. She is clearly chosen for cultural tokenism, yet also because she is unmistakably modelsque.
The third woman is Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a makeup artist and aspiring novelist who, when not brushing models’ faces (and feet), drops down anywhere to jot her poetic observations.
Although the film is flimsy in exploring its themes, there is a mesmerizing quality to Winocour’s gaze — the way she catches the anxiety swimming behind her characters’ eyes, the fear in their smallest movements, the shift in breathing and moods. The way they bottle their personal upheavals while working inside a high-pressure profession. All of this is captured beautifully.
The most substantial emotional weight, however, lies in Maxine, who is suddenly diagnosed with breast cancer during the thick of her busyness. There is no melodrama here — just the terrifying reality that a devastating illness can arrive at the worst possible moment, interrupting life and the pursuit of artistic fulfillment. Another layer of turmoil is her only child, a teenager in that tumultuous phase where distance from a parent becomes a rite of passage, and this adds to the heartbreak.
Maxine’s reaction to the diagnosis — and the urgency of treatment — arrives at the most inconvenient time, which gives the story resonance. In real life, grave news rarely waits for a kind opening.
But Couture ultimately feels lacking because it plays like a montage of women rather than a unified emotional experience. You get immersed in Maxine and Ada’s interiority, but the rest feels stretched, sometimes unnecessary.
Still, even without enough gut-punching slice-of-life force, the film has a magnetic pull, almost spellbinding. It brings to mind the way better All We Imagine as Light (2024) by Payal Kapadia, another three-woman portrait but set in Mumbai, inside a hospital. While Kapadia and Winocour share sensibilities, Light has stronger commentary and a more riveting sense of isolation and loneliness. Its themes and motifs land more solidly — and its visual language far more transcendent.
Winocour’s film feels shortchanged, but it is rescued by Jolie’s luminous performance, Anei’s striking presence, and that one unforgettable sequence: a breathtaking runway in the middle of a hurricane (with no warning?), with Maxine hiding a metastasis and teetering on a life-and-death tightrope, Ada masking a sprained ankle and the violence of displacement. The gusts of wind and sheets of rain symbolize life’s unpredictable storms — and that there is no recourse but to go through them.
3 out of 5 stars
Check QCinema screenings until the festival closes on 23 November.