‘Couture’ San Sebastian Review: Angelina Jolie Leads Alice Winocour’s Patchwork of Fashion Stories

Several stories from the fashion world are stitched together in Couture, a film whose title nods not only to haute couture itself but also to the broader idea of seams—emotional, psychological, and physical. Alice Winocour “weaves” (pun intended) different narratives set during the legendary Paris Fashion Week, a whirlwind of days that prove complicated for many of the people caught in its orbit. The film doesn’t aim to fully expose the contradictions or cruelties of the industry, but it does show its darker underside: the struggles and vulnerabilities behind the glossy surfaces of the runway.

At the center is Maxine, played by Angelina Jolie. Rather than portraying a designer or a model, Jolie takes on the role of an American horror filmmaker with indie roots, invited to Paris to shoot a vampire short that will accompany a fashion show. She plans to stay on and make a feature after that. But almost as soon as she arrives, she gets a phone call that the audience immediately recognizes as serious: a doctor has seen her biopsy results and insists she seek urgent medical advice in Paris. Maxine, focused on her project, brushes it aside, though the tension lingers.

Another thread follows an 18-year-old model from South Sudan, chosen to appear both in Maxine’s short and on the runway. She has no experience, isn’t sure she even wants to be in fashion (she’s studying to become a pharmacist), and can barely walk in heels. Thrown into the hyper-competitive modeling scene, she must quickly decide whether this world is really for her.

Tying these stories together is Angèle (Ella Rumpf, from Raw), a makeup artist who drifts from shows to shoots, trying to support the young women she works with while quietly collecting their stories in a notebook. She dreams of publishing them one day, and in a way, Couture feels like the film version of her observations—an anthology of fleeting but telling moments behind the spectacle.

Other figures round out the ensemble: Louis Garrel as a cinematographer with a connection to Maxine, Vincent Lindon as her doctor, plus a seamstress and fellow models struggling through the chaos of Fashion Week. Yet the film’s episodic structure is both its strength and its weakness. Not every storyline carries the same weight, and shifting constantly between them softens the overall impact.

Still, Jolie anchors the film with her magnetic presence. Maxine’s inner conflict—torn between ignoring her health and pursuing her art—resonates, and Winocour uses her character’s body, marked by potential surgery, to extend the film’s metaphor of “seams”: not just the clothes people wear, but the fragile bodies beneath them. When a major Fashion Week event is literally blown apart by a sudden storm, Couture makes its point clear—this is an industry that demands everything from its workers, even though the show itself can disappear in a gust of wind.