Alice Winocour and her Couture cast defied uncharacteristically wet weather in San Sebastian Sunday night for the European premiere of their new film, a drama backdropped by the glamorous frenzy of fashion week.
The French director-writer, known for her César Award-winning screenplay Mustang as well as the Eva Green-starring Proxima (2019) and Paris Memories (2022) led by Virginie Efira, returns to the Spanish film festival with even more star power. Angelina Jolie anchors Couture as Maxine, a 40-something American film director tasked with making a short piece of work for a Paris Fashion Week show. Amidst the glitz of fashion’s most chaotic week of the year, Maxine is diagnosed with breast cancer.
The movie, which had its world premiere at TIFF and now competes in San Sebastian’s main selection, examines how Maxine’s life intersects with two other women: Ada, a young model from South Sudan (Anyier Anei) who escapes a fraught future only to end up in a more frivolous environment, and Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a French makeup artist who dreams of being a writer. Louis Garrel stars as Maxine’s cinematographer, with whom she strikes up a relationship.
At the film’s press conference on Sunday, Jolie was emotional discussing her family history of cancer, an illness that took the life of both her mother and grandmother. The actress had a preventative double mastectomy in 2013. She told journalists: “I did choose to have that because I lost my mother and my grandmother very young, and I have the BRCA1 gene.”
She continued: “Those are my choices. I don’t say everybody should do it that way, but it’s important to have the choice. As Alice said, it’s uniting for not just women, of course, but anybody who’s gone through something [similar].”
The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Winocour ahead of the film’s premiere to discuss why this feature is not at all about fashion, but women and their trauma, or what Winocour calls “stitches.” The director explains her decision to make a movie set around the crossover of fashion and medicine, the double-meaning of the movie’s title and forming a close friendship with the Oscar-winning Jolie.
I would love to know how you arrived at this intersection of fashion and medicine, and why that was ripe material for you.
I think all my films come from very personal and intimate stories that I project into a very distant, unknown world. I didn’t know anything about fashion, but I experienced myself the journey of Maxime Walker. This journey is really the starting point. It happens that I live in a neighborhood which is the neighborhood of the fashion week and one day, I was coming out of the hospital, and I found myself in the middle of the crowded entrance of a fashion show, in the midst of the glitter, the lightness of this world. And when you leave the hospital, you need one thing: to connect to life, to the life that pulses.
In the crowd, I was looking at the models, the photographers. I felt suddenly connected with someone who was also from another world, a South Sudanese girl I saw who seemed lost in the streets [of Paris]. That’s what the film is about, sharing stitches — how you can connect with people who come from very different worlds.
You mention this stitching together of yours and Angelina’s stories. She has struggled with a family history of breast cancer, like her character Maxine. Was the role written for her?
At first, I had written the story from my own perspective. I knew Angelina could be interested and embody the part as she had an operation to escape this family fate. So from the very beginning, it was a special bond between her and me, definitely. Also, I think we did something with our stitches, both of us. Part of the whole DNA of my work as a director is to work on trauma and make something of it.
Angelina Jolie and Louis Garrel in Couture.
Courtesy of TIFF
Were you pleased with how Angelina embodied Maxine? Can you talk a little bit about the journey she goes on through the film?
I’m impressed by how Angelina immersed herself in the role, totally, [and] how she exposed her fragility. I think her part is all about the turmoil of this illness in the middle of the madness of a fashion world. It’s a film about a woman who learned she has a cancer, it’s not a film about cancer. In the same way it’s a film about a young African girl arriving in Paris confronted with the harshness of this world, and it’s not a film about fashion. I wanted to show solidarity between women. With Angelina, we were really lucky to have the possibility to do something out of our stitches, to tell a story. We hope to connect it with women who lived the same experience.
It’s about the untold stories of these women navigating Paris Fashion Week.
Exactly, yeah, and to speak of stitches — Couture is the title of the movie and in French it has a double meaning, with [the word] stitches. So it’s all of the stitches behind the couture.
Fashion is a metaphor for the contemporary world, which is a world of appearances. I was really interested in the backstage of that world, all the women that you never see, because when this world is looked at, it’s from a male perspective. It’s from the point of view of a male artistic director, the point of view of the power, etc., and I wanted to show what women were doing. The women who don’t have a voice, like seamstresses and makeup artists.
The film premiered in TIFF, and you got to see a North American audience’s reaction to that film. Do you notice a difference in the audience’s reactions when you then take your films across to European festivals?
I haven’t seen the reaction yet. But what we wanted to achieve, with Angelina, is to bring hope and to say to women: “You’re not alone.”
The San Sebastian International Film Festival 2025 runs Sept. 19-27.