The compressed script and the snippety modifying typically result in unintended comedy, as in a scene the place Maxine watches Christine, the seamstress, work. Whereas stitching by hand, Christine by accident pricks a finger with a needle, and Winocour reveals a drop of blood blossoming on her fingertip—solely to indicate her, an instantaneous later, once more stitching the white gown, with out as a lot as blotting or bandaging the finger to guard the garment. As for Angèle’s want to put in writing, it will get farmed out in a clip that she watches, of the late Marguerite Duras in a filmed interview, describing a author as somebody who doesn’t look forward to the fitting circumstances however merely and unhesitatingly writes. By protecting the film brisk, Winocour additionally turns it superficial, its substance faraway from the realm of expertise and trivialized into plot factors.
The result’s paradoxical, nonetheless, as a result of the dearth of detailed improvement afforded to the primary characters permits others to come back to the fore. Early within the movie, when Maxine is welcomed on the unnamed trend home (the scenes had been filmed within the workplaces of Chanel, the primary time the corporate allowed a fiction movie to shoot there), she’s acquired graciously by the corporate’s artistic director. He’s performed by Grégoire Colin, one of many nice trendy French actors, whose onscreen persona combines unrelieved woundedness with barely repressed violence. His character in “Couture”—sporting a finely tailor-made go well with and a sculpted company hairstyle—is genteel, cordial, ice-cold, and calmly terrifying. In a quick scene, with only a few glances and some strains of dialogue, he conveys the uncooked drive that drives the style business and its peacocky shows. A touch of battle between him and Maxine by no means bursts forth, however his prerogative lurks all through.
Different casting selections additional skew the story towards minor characters. Marillier and Rumpf are skilled younger actresses who’ve performed lead roles in different movies, however they don’t but have crystallized display screen personae, and the film doesn’t grant them sufficient cinematic area to develop their characters. Anei is a real-life mannequin who truly studied pharmacy (and, like Ada, lied to her father about her job), however she has little appearing expertise, and her presence within the movie calls out for affected person, quasi-documentary statement that by no means happens. In contrast, the three male actors who seem in main supporting roles—together with Colin, there’s Lindon because the physician and Louis Garrel as Maxine’s cinematographer and, in the end, lover—are all veterans whose iconic presences make their small roles really feel unusually, even inappropriately, distinguished. Lindon (who, like Colin, is a longtime affiliate of Claire Denis) carries the laborious fringe of worldliness, packs the facility of calculation, and strikes with an abrupt certitude—a trio of traits that give his physician character irresistible authority. As for Garrel, he’s heroically hangdog, the skilled artist incarnate, self-consciously delicate and playfully burdened. Because the stoic and sympathetic cinematographer, he represents the French movie business with modest and humane inventive qualities that Maxine—and, for that matter, Jolie—search out removed from Hollywood.
All of this makes me surprise what “Couture” would have regarded like if Jolie had directed it along with starring. She’s an actress of fierce energy even in repose, and when she directed herself within the 2015 film “By the Sea,” an intense story of marital discord, she unleashed melodramatic furies with tense restraint. “Couture” confronts an agonizing topic of which Jolie has firsthand information (in 2013, after discovering that she had a genetic predisposition to breast most cancers, she underwent a double mastectomy), and, within the face of the movie’s stolid path, she correctly downplays Maxine’s expressions and lets the topic itself ship its emotional drive—with one fascinating exception. The film’s turning level is a scene through which Dr. Hansen informs Maxine that she’ll require a tough course of therapy. He advises her to place all her skilled commitments apart, however she’s a month away from directing her long-pursued movie, and he or she poignantly, passionately tries to barter with him, as if, somewhat than making an attempt to save lots of her life, he had been a banker calling in a debt or a choose issuing a sentence. (On this regard, “Couture” has one thing in frequent with a extra completed new French movie, “The Little Sister,” directed by Hafsia Herzi—an emphasis on the skilled infrastructure of every day life, which Herzi equally achieved by means of casting. It’s a topic that has lengthy loomed, roughly conspicuously, within the French cinema, in the identical method that the establishments of French society, comparatively centralized and bureaucratized, loom massive in every day life.)