Tom's Guide Verdict: 'Couture'
- Rating: 2/5 stars
- Verdict: "Couture" attempts to share a deep story of a woman going through a tumultuous time on numerous fronts. Instead, it delivers an unengaging but polished drama that struggles to hold its attention on its main character.
- Where to watch: See "Couture" in theaters now
"Couture" is not your typical summer movie. It's no blockbuster by any means, nor was it intended to be a summer movie. Debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, it's a pure drama film, pitched as being centered around an award-worthy performance from Angelina Jolie.
To her credit, this movie's shortcomings aren't really Jolie's fault. In fact, that's the problem. If we got more of Jolie in this movie, maybe she'd have more opportunities to make or break this film. But for a movie that's supposedly centered around her and her emotional journey, she's missing from at least a third of it.
Unfortunately, her absence seriously derails the movie. The other characters we focus on — there are three point-of-view characters in the story — aren't uninteresting, but Jolie remains the main focus of the movie, and so we don't spend enough time to sink into the other storylines either.
In the end, the result is a surprisingly flat movie for a drama that clearly has ambitions of plumbing the depths of its characters' emotions. Jolie's character is going through genuine turmoil that should be engaging, but because the movie refuses to let us sit in her turmoil, our attention is free to wander.
Get the latest from Malcolm in your inbox'Couture' struggles to focus on its story
In "Couture," Jolie plays Maxine, an American filmmaker hired by a Parisian fashion house to craft a short film to precede its Paris Fashion Week show. As the movie goes along, it's made clear that she's also going through a tumultuous divorce that's caused friction between her and her daughter.
But then the real kicker comes: she's diagnosed with breast cancer. She's not expecting it at all, and now her time and attention are divided between filming, the divorce and the cancer diagnosis.
Unfortunately, the movie then chooses to divide our attention between her and two others. Ada (Anyier Anei) is a rookie model from South Sudan (via Kenya) hired to not only star in Maxine's movie but also to then walk out on the runway before everyone else during the show. Then there's Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a makeup artist who is working on writing a screenplay based on her experiences in the industry while running around the city to work at various events.
Any of these stories would be genuinely interesting. And if the movie chose to focus on just one of them, it'd be far better for it. Alternatively, if the movie chose to be a loose series of interconnected vignettes, that would also have been an intriguing choice with serious potential. But instead, it tries to portray Maxine as the main character while devoting significant chunks of time to Ada's story, and wrapping it up in the end with narration by Angèle, seemingly making it her story all along.
Verdict: 'Couture' stumbles on the runway
I wish I could recommend this movie, I really do. I find the individual stories contained within 'Couture' to be fascinating ... save a weird love story that feels shoehorned in towards the end. I'd have loved to see a version of this movie that focused just on Maxine, or brought her and Ada's storylines much closer together.
But that's not what we got, so I have to declare this movie not worth a trip to the cinema. It's likely to eventually come to one of the best streaming services (probably Hulu, given it's distributed by Vertical), so if you want to check it out for yourself, I'd wait until then. In the meantime, perhaps check out "The Devil Wears Prada" if you need your Parisian fashion fix, because this movie is too far off the mark.
"Couture" is in theaters now
