After debuting in Toronto last September, Alice Winocour‘s Couture (Vertical) opens theatrically, so to speak, on 6.26. Vertical is a streaming outfit that dips into theatrical, dilly-dally style, for appearance’s sake. If Couture had any real combustion it wouldn’t be a Vertical film.
Sonia Moskowitz, a hotshot photographer whom I’ve known since the early ’80s, is perfectly entitled to praise Couture as a good, worthwhile film….fine. But the indications have been everywhere for months that it’s not all that hot.
HE sez: I’ve been told that Couture is half-tolerable, but let’s get real — a 61% Rotten Tomatoes rating is not a ringing endorsement, and Sonia knows this. She’s nonetheless insisting it’s a keeper because (this is a fair presumption. I think) she feels a Jolie kinship born of gender and age.
Couture is basically an “uh-oh, I’ve got cancer!” movie set in Paris. My reaction to an Angelina Jolie character becoming seriously ill is, no offense, “tough titty.” Because by any fair standard Jolie, in real llife, is a steely, vindictive, white-knuckle hardcase.
I say this because she’s managed to persuade her progressive kids to renounce their father, Brad Pitt, because he acted violently due to drinking….ONCE…roughly ten years ago. (After which he got sober.) Only a rabid hater refuses to accept human vulnerability and turn the other cheek and extend the olive branch. Jolie is not my idea of a decent, fair-minded person. She’s truly bad news.
On top of which Couture‘s distributor, Vertical, is the bottom of the barrel.
What is my recommendation, based mostly on anti-Jolie prejudice, worth? Obviously not much, but if someone offered to pay me $100 to sit through it, I’d probably decline.