Review: Couture – The Art of Living Fragility.

Alice Winocour has always made films about bodies under pressure, about invisible scars and the strength we summon when no one is watching. From Augustine to Disorder, from Proxima to Revoir Paris, she has built a cinema that listens to silences, that faces trauma, resilience and the small gestures that sustain her characters. With Couture she takes that vision into a world that seems, at first sight, far from fragility: Paris Fashion Week, with its lights, its perfection, its instant glamour. And yet, she finds there the same essence that has always defined her work: bodies that resist, women who carry dreams and wounds, a fragile heartbeat beneath the spectacle.

Three women hold the film like three threads keeping the fabric together. Ada, a young model from South Sudan, fleeing a predetermined fate only to face another labyrinth in Paris. Angèle, a French make-up artist working backstage, dreaming of changing her own life while helping others shine for a fleeting moment. And Maxime, an American filmmaker who, in the chaos of fashion, receives a diagnosis that alters her body and her plans. Winocour films them all with the delicacy of a fine stitch: no hierarchies, no caricatures, only the quiet dignity of those who remain standing when everything around them demands otherwise.

The revelation is Angelina Jolie. She does not enter this story as a star or a myth, but as a woman daring to strip away every mask. Her Maxime is not heroic in the conventional sense; she is heroic in her vulnerability, in her decision to keep working, breathing, and existing while her own body resists her. Jolie inhabits silence with a rare honesty in contemporary cinema. A hand resting on her ribs, a gaze lost before stepping into the light: gestures that say more than any speech. There is immense courage in this performance, the courage of someone who knows that fragility can be the most powerful truth.

Louis Garrel, so often the ironic and charming Parisian, does something different here. He softens, steps aside, offers presence without domination. His melancholic humour and gentle irony bring balance, protecting the film from excessive gravity. He does not orbit as a star around the women: he becomes a steady light that allows them to shine even more.

Anyier Anei, as Ada, embodies a truth that needs no underlining. She walks, breathes, answers a phone call from her family in a quiet corner —and suddenly we feel the weight of the world pressing on her young shoulders. Adèle Montebourg, as Angèle, completes the trio with delicate precision: the invisible worker, the dreamer behind the mirror, reminding us that entire lives unfold in the shadows of other people’s moments of glory.

The film moves like fabric being sewn: the frenetic flashes of the runway, the slow breath of waiting rooms, the nervous rhythm of backstage corridors. There are no sharp cuts; time flows like stitches interweaving tension and tenderness. Fashion appears here not as glamour nor as mockery, but as a mirror of every cultural industry —including cinema itself— where bodies are demanded to remain invincible while slowly wearing out. Winocour never exploits nor ridicules: she observes, and in that observation there is immense dignity.

André Chemetoff’s camera caresses textures and colours: ochres and marbles in the ateliers, sterile greens in hospitals, electric blues under runway lights. Mirrors multiply the characters, forcing them to confront themselves: who am I when I look, who am I when nobody looks? The music by Anna von Hausswolff and Filip Leyman is like a pulse, almost a breath, sustaining without intruding; an invisible thread that keeps the fabric from unravelling.

Couture recalls Cléo from 5 to 7, Phantom Thread, All That Jazz or Personal Shopper, but it resembles none of them completely. What Winocour does is continue her own path: reaffirming that realism, far from being cold, is the most honest way to reach emotion. And here she overcomes an extraordinary challenge: filming illness without turning it into spectacle, filming fashion without reducing it to cliché, bringing together Hollywood, European cinema, and invisible backstage work —and making it breathe as a single fabric, fragile yet luminous.

The result is a film that feels light yet is dense, that seems silent yet is full of murmurs. It is not a parade of beautiful images, but a tapestry of lives quietly holding one another. Without great speeches, it reminds us that beauty does not save, but it can shelter; that care is a radical form of resistance; that choosing one’s own life, even disfigured, is a deeper act of style than any dress.

Couture does not speak only of fragility, but of the strength that arises when it is shared. The deepest beauty emerges in community, in the ability to hold one another. May we learn to look at each other with such tenderness and courage, because that is where true healing begins: in the community that turns vulnerability into strength, and the wound into a place of shared healing.

Xabier Garzarain