Angelina Jolie Just Brought Ultimate Glamour to the NY Screening of ‘Couture’
Few actresses carry the full weight of their own biography into a film role the way Angelina Jolie does in ‘Couture’. The drama, directed by Alice Winocour, has been building momentum since its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, and the special New York screening this week brought Jolie back into the spotlight in an understated but striking way, stepping out in a sleek black strapless Tom Ford gown and aviator sunglasses to mark the arrival of a project unlike anything she has done before.
In ‘Couture’, Jolie plays Maxine, an American filmmaker who arrives in Paris during the frenzy of Fashion Week, is drawn into a love story with a familiar collaborator, and finds herself on a deeply personal journey of self-discovery that forces her to confront the choices shaping her life. The film also follows three intersecting women’s stories, including Ada, a fresh-faced model from South Sudan escaping a predetermined future back home, and Angèle, a makeup artist working in the shadows of the catwalks. Written and directed by Winocour, it is a film about fashion only on the surface.
What lies beneath is a story about breast cancer, resilience, and the desire to keep living. Jolie, whose mother Marcheline Bertrand died of ovarian and breast cancer in 2007, revealed in 2013 that she underwent a preventive double mastectomy after testing positive for the BRCA1 gene, which raised her risk of developing breast cancer by 87 percent. Maxine’s diagnosis in the film is not a dramatic device. For Jolie, it is a deeply intimate territory.
Speaking at a panel conversation during the Toronto International Film Festival, Jolie said at Deadline’s TIFF studio, “It’s very personal to me, and women’s health and women’s cancers are very personal to me.” She has been an outspoken advocate on the subject for over a decade, and the act of playing a character navigating exactly this experience is, by her own account, something that goes far beyond professional craft.
The film’s message of community and shared humanity resonated deeply with Jolie, who described it as a piece about how everyone is dealing with things that make us very human, and how leaning on each other with more empathy makes life less lonely. She put that belief into action just days before the New York screening, hosting an intimate dinner at Atelier Jolie in the city to honor cancer survivors, with guests that included medical professionals, artists, and advocates.
At the TIFF world premiere, Jolie broke down in tears while sharing advice to an audience member who had recently lost a friend to cancer, recalling a memory of her own mother during her illness. “She said, ‘All anybody ever asks me about is cancer,'” Jolie told the crowd. “So I would say, if you know someone who’s going through something, ask them about everything else in their life as well. They’re a whole person, and they’re still living.”
‘Couture’ holds a unique distinction as the first fictional film to be shot inside Chanel’s real Paris showroom and atelier, giving the production an authenticity that extends to every detail of its fashion world backdrop. Winocour made a deliberate creative choice to show the industry from a female and working-class point of view, rather than through the lens of the powerful male artistic directors who typically dominate such stories.
Vertical partner Peter Jarowey, whose company is releasing the film in the United States, described Jolie’s performance as delivered with a quiet intensity that is both intimate and deeply personal, calling it brave filmmaking at its finest. That assessment aligns closely with what critics who saw the film at TIFF observed.
Jolie has also spoken candidly about her own scars in relation to the film, telling French Inter that she loves them because they represent a choice she made to stay alive as long as she could for her children, adding that she has always been more interested in the scars and the life that people carry than in any perfect idea of a life.
The New York event marks the final build toward the film’s wide American theatrical release, which is just days away. After its TIFF debut, ‘Couture’ opened in France in February, and its US theatrical rollout through Vertical is set for June 26. The progression from Toronto to Paris to New York mirrors the journey of the film itself, a story that crosses oceans and languages to arrive at something profoundly universal.
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