The tight script and fragmented editing sometimes lead to unintentional comedy, as in the scene where Maxine watches seamstress Christine at work. While sewing by hand, Christine accidentally pricks her finger with a needle, and Vinokur shows a drop of blood blooming on the tip of her finger, only to show her sewing a white dress again moments later, without even getting wet or bandaging her finger to protect the garment. As for Angรจleโs desire to write, it is reflected in the video she watches, where the late Marguerite Duras gives a video interview, describing the writer as a person who does not wait for the right circumstances, but writes simply and without hesitation. By keeping the film alive, Vinokur also makes it superficial, removing its content from the realm of experience and simplifying it into plot points.
However, the result is paradoxical, since the lack of detailed development of the main characters allows others to come to the fore. At the beginning of the film, when Maxine is greeted at an unnamed fashion house (scenes were filmed at the Chanel offices when the company first allowed a feature film to be filmed there), she is graciously received by the companyโs creative director. He is played by Grรฉgoire Colin, one of the greatest modern French actors, whose screen persona combines unbearable vulnerability and barely contained violence. His character in โHaute Couture,โ with his finely tailored suit and sculptural corporate haircut, is noble, warm, icy and quietly intimidating. In a short scene, with just a few glances and a few lines of dialogue, he conveys the raw power that drives the fashion industry and its peacock-like manifestations. The conflict between him and Maxine is never hinted at, but his prerogative lurks throughout.
Other casting choices further skew the story toward supporting characters. Marillier and Rumpf are experienced young actresses who have starred in other films, but they have not yet developed screen personas, and the film does not give them enough cinematic space to develop their characters. Anei is a real-life model who actually studied pharmacy (and, like Ada, lied to her father about her job), but she has little acting experience, and her presence in the film requires a patient, quasi-documentary observation that never happens. By contrast, the three male actors who play the lead supporting roles (along with Colin, Lyndon as the doctor, and Louis Garrel as Maxineโs cameraman and eventual lover) are all veterans whose iconic presence makes their small roles unusually, even incongruously, standout. Lyndon (who, like Colin, is a longtime collaborator of Claire Denis) carries a gritty edge to the world, possesses a force of calculation and acts with sudden confidence โ three traits that give his doctor character an unstoppable power. As for Garrel, he is heroically driven, the epitome of a professional artist, self-consciously sensitive and playfully burdened. As a stoic and sympathetic cinematographer, he represents the French film industry with the humble and humane artistic qualities that Maxine โ and Jolie, for that matter โ seek away from Hollywood.
All of this makes me wonder what Haute Couture would have looked like if Jolie had not only directed it, but also starred. Sheโs an actress of fierce intensity even at rest, and when she starred in 2015โs By the Sea, an intense story of family discord, she unleashed melodramatic fury with tense restraint. โHaute Coutureโ confronts harrowing subject matter that Jolie knows first-hand (in 2013, after discovering she had a genetic predisposition to breast cancer, she underwent a double mastectomy), and despite the filmโs stolid direction, she wisely downplays Maxineโs facial expressions and lets the subject express her emotional powerโwith one interesting exception. The turning point of the film is the scene in which Dr. Hansen informs Maxine that she will need a complex course of treatment. He advises her to put aside all her professional commitments, but with a month left before she shoots her long-awaited film, she keenly and passionately tries to negotiate with him, as if he were a banker calling for repayment of a debt, or a judge passing a sentence, instead of trying to save her life. (In this respect, Haute Couture has something in common with the superior new French film Little Sister, directed by Hafsia Gherzi โ the emphasis on the professional infrastructure of everyday life, which Gherzi also achieved through casting. This theme has long loomed large, more or less prominently, in French cinema, just as the institutions of French society, relatively centralized and bureaucratic, have loomed large in everyday life.)