by Gill Pringle at San Sebastian International Film Festival
The 73rd edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival saw stars Angelina Jolie and Louis Garrel attend the premiere of the film Couture, which is in official competition.
While as per the title, Couture is wrapped up in fashion and beauty, writer/director Alice Winocour (Proxima, Augustine) also shines an unflinching light on women’s lives with all the complexity, pain, beauty and joy.
A subject very close to her heart, Angelina Jolie plays Maxine, an American filmmaker diagnosed with breast cancer while working in Paris.
Set during the frenzy of Paris Fashion Week, Maxine’s life intersects with those of so many other women – including Ada (Anyier Anei), a young South Sudanese model escaping from home and Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a makeup artist who works in the shadows of the catwalks and dreams of becoming a writer.
During the course of Couture, we also meet all the nameless seamstresses, catwalk models and make-up artists whose lives depend on the often grueling work which might even appear glamorous on the outside.
As their paths cross, the film reveals the quiet resilience beneath the surface of public performance and the unspoken solidarity shared among these women across professions, cultures and continents.
Couture of course echoes Jolie’s own health journey, having undergone a preventive double mastectomy in 2013 after learning that she carried the BRCA1 gene, which increases an individual’s risk for developing breast and/or ovarian cancer.
Jolie’s actress mother, Marcheline Bertrand, was only 56 when she died from ovarian cancer and she also lost her grandmother to the disease.
“I did choose to have that [surgery] because I lost my mother and my grandmother very young, and I have the BRCA gene, so I chose to have a double mastectomy a decade ago. And then I’ve also had my ovaries removed – because that’s also what took my mother,” she says at the film’s press conference at San Sebastian, the second time that the film has screened following its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month.
“Those are my choices. I don’t say everybody should do it that way, but it’s important to have the choice. And I don’t regret it.
“I think there’s much to say about this, of course. And as Alice says – it is uniting for not just women but for anybody who’s gone through something, or someone feels vulnerable and alone.
“There’s something very particular to women’s cancers, because it obviously affects us, and how we feel as women. I think it’s important, and maybe a message to anybody who’s with a woman you love to understand.
“When I read that she [Maxine, Jolie character in the film] was diagnosed, I had an idea of where the film was going to go, and I certainly didn’t think it would end the way this film ends, and I didn’t think that the man in the film would respond in the way that he did, or that the desire would still be a part of the film. I think that it’s really important to understand that and to continue to live and be desirous and feel as a woman, and for those who love those women, to remind them that maybe that’s something that you can do,” says Jolie, prompting her co-star Louis Garrel to speak up.
“As you can see, the level of tenderness and softness – it was like a drug because it was listening to all these intelligent and brilliant women,” says the French actor who plays a colleague to whom Maxine turns to in seeking reassurance of her femininity following her diagnosis.
If Couture might seem, at its heart, a women’s film, then popular French actor Garrel is here to say otherwise. “This is why the movie is good for me. It’s because it speaks about cancer plus sex, obviously. Generally, when you speak about cancer, especially with cancer of breast, movies are speaking with a pathetic tone, and it’s not pathetic at all. It can be dramatic in the movie, but it’s also connected to desire. Because men – we are more strange than that – even with somebody who lost their breast, it can be more exciting erotically,” says the actor.
“I mean, our eroticism . . . you have to understand that men can be eroticised in multiple ways. We are excited by such strange stuff sometimes. It’s such fantastic stuff. So, don’t be afraid about anything. I’m talking about women in general, because the mind of men is more original than what the publicity’s saying out there,” he says to a spontaneous round of applause.
Throughout filming Couture, Jolie honoured her mother in her own unique way. “I did wear my mother’s necklace [in the film]. I also wore her ashes, which is part of the film. I thought about her a lot, and I think everybody in this room has sat in a hospital room. Maybe some of you have been through heavier things, and you know that someone before you has had that exact moment.
“When I went through mine, I was following my mother and certainly in filming this I would think about all of these moments for her, and I wish that she had this community. I wish she was able to speak more openly as I’ve been, and have people respond as graciously as you have, and not feel as alone,” says the actress.
Ask what message she believes Marcheline might have given to Maxine, Jolie smiles and says, “I think she would have told Maxine to live every day and focus on life. You can’t take any moment for granted.”
