Alice Winocour and her Couture solid defied uncharacteristically moist climate in San Sebastian Sunday night time for the European premiere of their new movie, a drama backdropped by the glamorous frenzy of trend week.
The French director-writer, identified for her César Award-winning screenplay Mustang in addition to the Eva Inexperienced-starring Proxima (2019) and Paris Recollections (2022) led by Virginie Efira, returns to the Spanish movie competition with much more star energy. Angelina Jolie anchors Couture as Maxine, a 40-something American movie director tasked with making a brief piece of labor for a Paris Vogue Week present. Amidst the glitz of trend’s most chaotic week of the 12 months, Maxine is recognized with breast most cancers.
The film, which had its world premiere at TIFF and now competes in San Sebastian’s major choice, examines how Maxine’s life intersects with two different ladies: Ada, a younger mannequin from South Sudan (Anyier Anei) who escapes a fraught future solely to finish up in a extra frivolous setting, and Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a French make-up artist who goals of being a author. Louis Garrel stars as Maxine’s cinematographer, with whom she strikes up a relationship.
At the movie’s press convention on Sunday, Jolie was emotional discussing her household historical past of most cancers, an sickness that took the lifetime of each her mom and grandmother. The actress had a preventative double mastectomy in 2013. She advised journalists: “I did select to have that as a result of I misplaced my mom and my grandmother very younger, and I’ve the BRCA1 gene.”
She continued: “These are my selections. I don’t say everyone ought to do it that approach, nevertheless it’s necessary to have the selection. As Alice mentioned, it’s uniting for not simply ladies, after all, however anyone who’s gone by one thing [similar].”
The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Winocour forward of the movie’s premiere to debate why this function is under no circumstances about trend, however ladies and their trauma, or what Winocour calls “stitches.” The director explains her determination to make a film set across the crossover of trend and medication, the double-meaning of the film’s title and forming a detailed friendship with the Oscar-winning Jolie.
I might like to know the way you arrived at this intersection of trend and medication, and why that was ripe materials for you.
I feel all my movies come from very private and intimate tales that I venture into a really distant, unknown world. I didn’t know something about trend, however I skilled myself the journey of Maxime Walker. This journey is absolutely the place to begin. It occurs that I stay in a neighborhood which is the neighborhood of the style week and in the future, I used to be popping out of the hospital, and I discovered myself in the midst of the crowded entrance of a trend present, within the midst of the glitter, the lightness of this world. And whenever you go away the hospital, you want one factor: to connect with life, to the life that pulses.
Within the crowd, I used to be trying on the fashions, the photographers. I felt instantly related with somebody who was additionally from one other world, a South Sudanese lady I noticed who appeared misplaced within the streets [of Paris]. That’s what the movie is about, sharing stitches — how one can join with individuals who come from very totally different worlds.
You point out this stitching collectively of yours and Angelina’s tales. She has struggled with a household historical past of breast most cancers, like her character Maxine. Was the position written for her?
At first, I had written the story from my very own perspective. I knew Angelina could possibly be and embody the half as she had an operation to flee this household destiny. So from the very starting, it was a particular bond between her and me, positively. Additionally, I feel we did one thing with our stitches, each of us. A part of the entire DNA of my work as a director is to work on trauma and make one thing of it.
Angelina Jolie and Louis Garrel in Couture.
Courtesy of TIFF
Have been you happy with how Angelina embodied Maxine? Are you able to speak slightly bit in regards to the journey she goes on by the movie?
I’m impressed by how Angelina immersed herself within the position, completely, [and] how she uncovered her fragility. I feel her half is all in regards to the turmoil of this sickness in the midst of the insanity of a trend world. It’s a movie a couple of girl who discovered she has a most cancers, it’s not a movie about most cancers. In the identical approach it’s a movie a couple of younger African lady arriving in Paris confronted with the harshness of this world, and it’s not a movie about trend. I needed to point out solidarity between ladies. With Angelina, we have been actually fortunate to have the chance to do one thing out of our stitches, to inform a narrative. We hope to attach it with ladies who lived the identical expertise.
It’s in regards to the untold tales of those ladies navigating Paris Vogue Week.
Precisely, yeah, and to talk of stitches — Couture is the title of the film and in French it has a double which means, with [the word] stitches. So it’s all the stitches behind the couture.
Vogue is a metaphor for the modern world, which is a world of appearances. I used to be actually within the backstage of that world, all the ladies that you just by no means see, as a result of when this world is checked out, it’s from a male perspective. It’s from the viewpoint of a male creative director, the viewpoint of the ability, and so on., and I needed to point out what ladies have been doing. The ladies who don’t have a voice, like seamstresses and make-up artists.
The movie premiered in TIFF, and you bought to see a North American viewers’s response to that movie. Do you discover a distinction within the viewers’s reactions whenever you then take your movies throughout to European festivals?
I haven’t seen the response but. However what we needed to realize, with Angelina, is to carry hope and to say to ladies: “You’re not alone.”
The San Sebastian Worldwide Movie Competition 2025 runs Sept. 19-27.