Angelina Jolie and the superficial depth of haute couture

In France, fashion, like cinema, is considered an artistic practice linked to national identity. Perhaps for this reason, Alice Winocour has had access to the backstage of Chanel (although the brand is not identified as such at any time) to shoot this drama that takes haute couture as the setting to interweave various female trajectories. The main one, that of Maxime (Angelina Jolie), an American filmmaker who, while shooting the campaign for this brand's new collection, is diagnosed with cancer. Her tribulations intersect, during Fashion Week, with those of the model who is to star in the campaign, the seamstress who sews the star dress, and the makeup artist who lives with all of them.

Winocour does not seem as interested in portraying the internal dynamics of this sector as in the human dimension of the workers involved, with the aim of breaking the prejudice that would associate fashion and superficiality. The filmmaker thus underlines the importance of the drama that each of the protagonists goes through. Jolie's character has to confront her possible mortality; the young model moves forward after escaping from a war-torn country (and she is not the only one in this scenario); the makeup artist acts as an amateur writer to capture her testimony of the problems faced by these professionals, and the seamstress becomes the almost silent and most marginal representative of the fatigues (but also satisfactions) accumulated by fashion workers. Couture is more interesting when it adopts an almost observational gaze to portray fashion routines from within, than when it insists on the difficulties, especially of the protagonist, a Jolie who is too rigid in her stereotype of a courageous woman facing adversity. The film ends up exhibiting a superficial depth and does not dare to delve into the complexities and tolls that haute couture exacts.