Haute Couture captures the beauty and richness of Paris

It may be set in the softly lit beauty of a designer atelier, but the real richness of Paris is woven throughout Haute Couture.

Nathalie Baye and Lyna Khoudri in Haute Couture. Picture: Roger Do Minh

The artful French film Haute Couture is an ode to the beauty of craftsmanship, and the parallel to what happens on screen with how it’s presented is obvious.

If you’re going to make a movie about dedication and care to craft, you better live it. Thankfully, it does.

Haute Couture, directed by Sylvie Ohayon, is a work that celebrates the beauty of fashion with its near-fetishistic close-ups of luxurious fabrics and nimble hands, but it’s also a touching drama about purpose, belonging and the expectations we place on others and ourselves.

The seamless blending of both, a character drama and visual feast for the sartorial inclined, Haute Couture is a thoughtful, compelling and genuinely appealing film.

Dior head seamstress Esther (Nathalie Baye) is preparing for her last collection. Her retirement isn’t her choice and she’s shaky about what’s next. When her colleague Catherine (Pascal Arbillot) tells her to make the most of life, she replies, “This is where I make the most of life, it’s all I know”.

Lyna Khoudri in Haute Couture.

While in the subway, her bag is snatched by two young women, Jade (Lyna Khoudri) and Souad (Soumaye Bocoum).

When Jade decides to return the ill-gotten goods, having traced Esther to the Dior atelier from the work pass in the handbag, she unexpectedly finds herself out to dinner with her victim.

Esther, noticing Jade’s delicate hands and lack of direction, offers her an internship at Dior, but not without a few terse words first.

Their prickly chemistry is one usually born from familiarity – and it’s spot-on casting pairing Baye and Khoudri for this unorthodox, surrogate mother-daughter relationship. It’s a push-and-pull in which they both disappoint and they both nourish.

They also have something lacking in their actual mother-daughter relationships – Esther doesn’t see her daughter and Jade’s mother is a melancholic who doesn’t get out of bed.

The world of Dior is far from anything Jade has been immersed in, as she’s judged for her “ghetto” roots, both by the haughty colleague Andree (Claude Perron) and by herself.

Haute Couture is an ode to craftsmanship.

Haute Couture explores this interesting dynamic about Paris, manifested as Jade’s self-selecting out because of her lower socio-economic and part-immigrant identity. In an early scene, she berates the ethnically-Arab security guard at Dior, accusing him of being a “bourgeois collaborator”.

She and her friend Souad are part of Paris’ multicultural fabric and the way the characters are shown to feel as if they’re not quite French is a rich vein Haute Couture taps into.

The two worlds are even lensed differently. Esther’s milieu and the Dior atelier have a softer focus and clean lines while Jade’s haunts are grittier and cramped, packed with the accoutrements of a different life.

By the end though, it’s clear that both these worlds make up Paris, even if some of it isn’t showcased in the travel brochures or on Instagram.

As are both these characters, two people from seemingly contrasting worlds but who, ultimately, save each other from the resentments of feeling alone, unmoored and unwanted. And isn’t that the real beauty of Paris?

Rating: 3.5/5

Haute Couture is in cinemas now