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In “Couture,” Angelina Jolie plays Maxine, a low-budget horror movie director juggling a film commission from a French luxury fashion house and being a single mother in the midst of a divorce when she receives a devastating
breast cancer diagnosis.
“Couture” writer and director Alice Winocour says she wrote the French and English language drama with the Oscar-winner in mind.
“I needed someone special, someone that would have a special connection with the story,” Winocour says. “Angelina has a lot in common with the character. She’s also a director and she has been through this — not cancer — but everyone knows her story. So I felt like it’s for her.”
The film mirrors some of Jolie’s real-life experiences. While she was never diagnosed with cancer like Maxine, Jolie revealed in a New York Times op-ed that she underwent a preventive double mastectomy because she carried the BRCA1 gene, which sharply increases an individual’s risk for developing breast and/or ovarian cancer. Jolie’s mother was only 56 when she died from ovarian cancer. She also lost her grandmother to the disease.
“Also what I liked with Angelina was that she had this kind of punk spirit and punk energy and raw energy, and it’s really what I wanted for the film,” Winocour says.
I’m on a Zoom with Winocour and Jolie.
I ask Jolie if she considers herself punk. “I think I’m more punk now,” she says. “Yes, it has an energy, but it’s also kind of the counter movement to a lot of what’s happening. So even sometimes my privacy or not completely being sucked into a lot of things or movements — sometimes the doing less, or being private, when the world is the way it is right now, that is an opposite.”
But then, Jolie hints at her private life and alludes to her messy divorce from Brad Pitt.
“I think my fighting spirit is finally back,” she says. “I lost it for a bit. I got kind of taken down a little bit and it’s coming back in large part thanks to my children, who are now older, and encouraging it.”
She further explains, “My kids are almost all 18, so now they want to see me traveling the world, they want me to get out and do things. They know me more than anybody, and they still like me, which says a lot. I think they’re very encouraging of me kind of getting back to aspects of myself that maybe I hadn’t felt as free to do.”
In fact, before splitting from Pitt, Jolie decided she was done with acting. “I had kind of quit acting before my divorce,” she says. “I was focusing on directing, and I thought I’d be doing my international work. But then suddenly the only way to be home more and for short periods of time being away or to make a good amount of money, was to go back to acting. I was only taking things that were short or close by or I could take [my children].”
“Couture” is very much an ensemble co-starring Ella Rumpf as a makeup artist and aspiring writer, and South Sudanese model Anyier Anei as a new model who travels to Paris for the first time and is the star of Maxine’s fashion film. All three women find themselves meeting each other at pivotal and very vulnerable times in their lives. “We are stronger together,” Winocour says. “The film is about also the solidarity and that woman who bare scars, sometimes you tell you the most personal thing you have to a stranger … What we wanted to show was this fragile moment between human beings.”
The original title of the film was “Ride or Die,” Winocour says. “It’s about the spirit of survival,” she says. “The world is so difficult. It’s like, let’s celebrate life together. We see all the wounds behind the perfect images, but it’s all those people who are connecting to each other and sharing things together.”
In one scene, a doctor outlines Maxine’s incision lines with red ink on her bare chest ahead of undergoing a double mastectomy. Jolie said Vincent Lindon, who plays the physician, was so convincing she felt as if he was with a real doctor: “As a patient, as a woman, I wanted to lean on him and ask him, ‘Am I going to be OK?’”
The scene brought back memories of her own health journey. “It’s very sobering in realizing – like the [doctor] says in the film — we’re all going to die, we’re all not here forever,” Jolie says. “I think having lost my mom young and never met my grandmother, I have never lived feeling like I’m going to have a long life. I’m already past the age when my mother was diagnosed. I may struggle from almost feeling like I can’t live in the moment because I feel like I have to push and rush because time’s running out.”
She continues, “I raise my kids almost preparing them for my absence and not as much preparing to be a grandmother,” she continues. “That’s what happens when you consider death as a reality.”
“Couture” is in theaters June 26.
