A Formidable Angelina Jolie Anchors Observant Fashion Drama ‘Couture’

Jolie is a formidable actor, and she makes you believe both in Maxine’s initial disbelief and, a little later, in her whirring sense of urgency. But even though Jolie’s Maxine has main-character energy to spare, she’s not necessarily the most compelling figure here. Winocour, a smart, sensitive director, made one of the most striking films of 2022, Revoir Paris, featuring Virginie Efira as a woman struggling with trauma after surviving a Paris terrorist attack. In that movie, as in this one, Winocour displays a gift for sculpting small moments; she may be better at them than she is at shaping big, revelatory ones.

And so it’s the minor characters of Couture that we may end up caring most about. There’s Ada (played, with beguiling fortitude, by Anyier Anei), an aspiring model who arrives in Paris from South Sudan. She is to star in Maxine’s preshow movie; she has also been designated as the model who will open the show, a terrifying prospect considering that despite her innate elegance, she doesn’t think of herself as a model at all. She’s an outsider looking in, our personal guide to this weird, unwelcoming world.