The film opens in theaters Friday.
1 of 4 | Angelina Jolie attends the world premiere of “Couture” during the Toronto International Film Festival at the Princess of Wales Theatre in 2025. File Photo by Chris Chew/UPI | License Photo
Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie says her late mother Marcheline Bertrand was a tremendous inspiration for her performance in the film, Couture.
Opening in theaters Friday, Couture follows Maxine (Jolie), an American filmmaker working the assignment of a lifetime at Paris Fashion Week and dealing with a divorce back home when she learns she has aggressive breast cancer.
“My mom told me once, when she’d been living with it a few years, she said, ‘All anybody ever asks me about is cancer,'” Jolie, 51, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
“She stopped getting asked, was she writing? Was she reading?” the actress recalled. [Cancer] became too much of an identity.”
The real-life mother of six children said it is important to her that this film, which she also produced, reminds audience members they are complete people who are not solely defined by their struggles.
“You don’t stop being a mother, stop working in some way, creating, being a sexual person,” she added. “These things are important.”
The drama also explores the personal challenges seamstress Christine (Garance Marillier) and model Ada (Anyier Anei) are quietly enduring as they go about their jobs at the glamorous event.
“It’s not one woman’s story. It’s a few different women, coming from different backgrounds, dealing with different issues,” Jolie said, adding she wants the film to inspire people to be more empathetic towards each other.
“Everybody’s struggling through something in their lives,” she said. “You go through things and you find yourself very isolated and I think this film itself encourages a kind of connection and a way of pushing through and living.”
Writer-director Alice Winocour agreed.
“It’s a story of women’s solidarity and women connecting to each other and, yes, I think the idea, also, was to bring hope and to say to other women, but also men who had been through those kind of situations: ‘You’re not alone. We’ve been through this.’ And, so, that was, I think, the starting point.”
Winocour and Jolie were given unprecedented access to Chanel’s Paris Fashion Week showroom and atelier.
“It was a way to talk about this craziness,” Winocour said. “The idea was to look behind those perfect images of fashion. What were the lives of those women and workers in fashion?”
Winocour said that the film is really about the fragility of life, “like a dress.”
“We see a dress in the film and then there is this big storm and it’s all ruined. It’s really like life. It’s something very ephemeral. It doesn’t last long. And, so, I thought it was interesting to have someone confronted with the idea of her death in that world.”
After directing her own films such as First They Killed My Father, By the Sea, Unbroken and In the Land of Blood and Honey, Jolie was happy to collaborate with Winocour, instead of having to manage every detail of a production.
“I do love directing,” Jolie said. “But when I’m with a great director like Alice, I get to be in her mind and her world and, yes, just relax into just focusing on performance, which can also be lovely.”
The film co-stars Louis Garrel, Ella Rumpf and Vincent Lindon.
Hollywood star Angelina Jolie turns 51
Cast member Angelina Jolie arrives at the premiere of the box office hit “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” in Los Angeles on June 7, 2005. Jolie met future partner Brad Pitt on the set of the film. Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo
