COUTURE

Angelina Jolie is one of current cinema’s most glamorous actresses. So, the concept of having her play a filmmaker working with a young African actress struggling to fit into her first film set while herself facing up to a serious breast cancer diagnosis might seem like a compelling tale for arthouse audiences. Sadly, Jolie’s new movie, COUTURE, lacks a dramatic pulse and has a casual amorality about sex that leaves viewers wondering how they got stuck with bargain-bin quality.

Jolie plays Maxine Walker, an American film director who’s in the midst of directing a vampire movie that stars a young Sudanese actress named Ada (Anyier Anei). Maxine struggles with constantly sexist comments from the men on her Parisian set. Meanwhile, she also faces a breast cancer diagnosis that would shake Maxine to her core if Jolie didn’t portray her as being dramatically hollow.

Meanwhile, Ada is facing struggles of her own, as she tries to deal with the culture clash that comes from being transported from the desolate life she knew in Sudan and onto a glamorous movie set with young white models who treat her with disdain. In the movie’s only other discernible attempt at a plot, Maxine is also attracted to a crew member named Anton (Louis Garrel), with whom she has an extremely casual and graphic affair.

COUTURE is written and directed by French filmmaker Alice Winocour, who offers viewers no one worth caring about and a plot that goes nowhere. The movie has a strong, somewhat mixed pagan worldview with a casual amorality about sex, including a graphic sex scene and other scenes with explicit nudity. This is combined with some light moral content stressing kindness, and a scene where a woman prays to God for confidence.

However, COUTURE also has a steady smattering of strong obscenities along with lighter ones, three profanities, and brief flashes of a bloody zombie movie’s gore-filled footage. So, MOVIEGUIDE® finds the movie excessive and unacceptable.