After world-premiering at Toronto, Couture [+lire aussi :
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interview : Alice Winocour et Louis Ga…
fiche film] now takes San Sebastián’s main competition by storm with a tale about the intertwined lives of a set of women unfolding during Paris Fashion Week. During a round-table interview at the Basque festival, writer-director Alice Winocour and actor Louis Garrel – who stars opposite a French-speaking Angelina Jolie as the leading character of Maxine Walker – shared their understanding of the film’s intricate themes of body politics, sexuality and finding connections in seemingly different lived experiences.

Winocour kicked off by exploring the film in the context of her broader oeuvre. “I think all of my films come from very personal or intimate things that I project into distant worlds. I try to investigate these worlds and make them my own. In this case, it was the world of Paris Fashion Week. I also have a special relationship with cancer, as I know it very well. The idea was to mix these two worlds.”

She also explained the origins of the film’s premise, which arose from exiting the hospital and seeing a young Sudanese girl lost on the streets of Paris. “The film is really about this immediate connection you can have with someone coming from another world. It’s a film about women. It's a film about a woman who learns she has cancer, but it’s not a film about cancer. It’s about a woman coming from a country at war who experiences the harshness of Fashion Week, but it’s not a film about fashion.”

The movie has two main male characters: that of Garrel’s Anton – the cinematographer of Jolie’s Maxine – and Maxine’s doctor, played by Vincent Lindon, with whom Winocour reunites more than a decade after her 2012 effort Augustine [+lire aussi :
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fiche film]. Garrel shared his understanding of the importance of portraying his character alongside that of Jolie’s, in a bid to uplift her character’s story arc.

“I have a friend whose wife had breast cancer, and he was taking care of her. Obviously, it’s connected to sexuality for women. She starts to be afraid of losing her attractiveness. It was important in the movie that cancer should not be attached to a fear of dying, [but something else]. Alice and I talked about the fact that the movie had to be very sensual between Angelina’s character and mine. This fear of death can also be very exciting and erotic.”

Winocour interjected to elaborate on the significance of casting Garrel in this role. “It was also very important to have Louis as this very physical and animalistic presence. It’s what I like to film in male characters: this fragility underneath the surface. His character is much more silent than what we are used to seeing with Louis in French films.”

She also explained that she undertook research backstage in the fashion world, similar to her process in the world of astronauts with Proxima [+lire aussi :
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bande-annonce
interview : Alice Winocour
fiche film]. “I wanted to see behind the perfect images and perfect bodies – and the glorification of female bodies. What is the real body of a woman?

“Traumatised and post-traumatised bodies are very important in my work. Changes and mutations in the female body also interest me. Proxima was about an astronaut mutating in order to go into space – and my first film, Augustine, was about hysteria and someone who was like a spectator to the rebellion of her own body. Couture is about female bodies, as all of the characters are like the same woman at 20, 30 and 40 years old. To me, they’re the same. There are parts of me in all of them, but what I wanted to show [in Angelina's body] was this intimate story in the body of an icon – to see the fragility and vulnerability behind the power of this iconic body.”

Garrel closed by praising Jolie’s presence in the feature: her own preventative double mastectomy created thematically fitting stitches within Couture’s cinematic mosaic. “Angelina is like a queen – truly, a queen. But behind that image, there is a punk. Angelina is completely punk and was very interested in making this movie, even showing her body and so on, because she is a punk and not conventional. An imperfect body can be very interesting.”