Saint Laurent

Among the more fascinating details about Saint Laurent, Bertrand Bonello’s oblique film that ruminates on the revolutionary fashion designer, is that Yves Saint Laurent’s former lover and business partner, Pierre Bergé, did not endorse it. Bergé approved of the far more straightforward biopic directed by Jalil Lespert, called Yves Saint Laurent, which was also released in France in 2014. Lespert’s conventional drama hits every predictable beat, adopting a paint-by-numbers biographical structure that sought prestige attention, including a César Award for its lead actor, Pierre Niney. And though Bonello’s 2014 film earned multiple César Award nominations, several more than Lespert’s film—but won none of them—it also takes a more complex view of its subject. Instead of aggrandizing Yves Saint Laurent’s legacy and building his myth into a cinematic commercial for the YSL brand, Bonello invests himself in the complex and broken person—played in a committed internal performance by Gaspard Ulliel—who created some of the most iconic fashion lines of the twentieth century. Rather than a hagiography, Bonello confronts his subject’s personhood without dwelling on his genius, leaving viewers with no clear sense of how one should feel about Yves Saint Laurent. That’s part of what makes the film so exceptional.

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