Saint Laurent a faithful, lavish depiction of fashion icon

Bertrand Bonello’s biopic Saint Laurent is a deliberately hot mess, simultaneously precise and excessive, much like its subject, Yves Saint Laurent, himself. Bonello has directed and co-written a curious film that slithers under viewers skin and stays there even as they exit the theater. Hopscotching through the ’60s and ’70s, the height of Saint Laurent’s career, Bonello dares the audience to judge Saint Laurent’s excesses.

As Bonello intended, in the film Yves Saint Laurent (Gaspard Ulliel) remains a mythical fashion icon. Even after 150 minutes, Saint Laurent is still an enigma. Surrounded by his coterie of muses — the striking Betty Catroux (Aymeline Valade), whom he sees literally sees as a reflection of himself, and Loulou de la Falaise (Léa Seydoux), the original bohemian vintage goddess — Saint Laurent uses others as a shield. The man is interesting, but unsympathetic. He is so removed that it is difficult to care about him. Part of Saint Laurent’s alienation from the audience is justified because it mirrors the disintegration of his own relationships. It is easy to see why, in 1989, the aged Saint Laurent (Helmut Berger), eerily still voiced by Ulliel, sits alone in his apartment.

The man and the myth are inseparable. Ulliel’s performance is inspired in the way that he catches onto the performative aspects of being Yves Saint Laurent. Yves is simultaneously playful and cruel, guarded and vulnerable, and Ulliel constructs these contradictory traits through an extra-slim physique, a reedy voice and an analytical and intelligent performance. Catching glances of himself in the omnipresent mirrors in the film, Ulliel’s Yves Saint Laurent is just as much a designer of himself as he was of women’s clothing. Part of the realism is helped by the fact that Ulliel drew the actual drawings that appear in the film.

The Viscontian influence on Bonello comes through in the themes of nostalgia, change and stagnation. Bonello’s original score is a lush mix of Callas, Creedence Clearwater Revival and others. It is again about being stuck in the past and the present. Saint Laurent has such a fear of stagnation, but he is obsessed with Proust, emotionally attached to the recreation of past worlds like the ’40s inspired Liberation collection and Ballet Russes, and insecure about the ephemeral nature of fashion. He surrounds himself with a world of Grecian busts and buddhas and Matisse paintings. Bonello takes care to use film techniques to evoke Saint Laurent’s favored Mondrian in the geometric screen divisions. A montage of YSL collections split-screened with real world events, is an inelegant but accurate metaphor to express the simultaneous change and inertia of these people.

The film zooms in on his affair with the deliciously hedonistic and infantile Jacques de Bascher (Louis Garrel). The relationship is obviously dangerous from the moment the pair’s eyes lock across a club under a rainbow of neon lights, separated by frenetically pulsing bodies in various stages of intoxication. At the same time, Saint Laurent is bound by his strained relationship with his business partner and longtime-lover Pierre Bergé (Jérémie Renier). Renier portrays just the right amount of control and love in a quasi-heroic and chaotic six-minute business negotiation scene involving American investors and a simultaneous interpreter. He is sympathetic because it is clear how much Yves Saint Laurent, the brand and the man, need him.

There is, also the matter of that other Yves Saint Laurent film — the one, by Jalil Lespert, endorsed by YSL. It’s fitting that the film is titled Saint Laurent, because the film is also a love letter the people working behind the scenes. In the Saint Laurent atelier, headed by the formidable but warm Anne Marie Munoz (Amira Casar), dozens of seamstresses take measurements, cut, sew and drape. Munoz leads a team of seamstresses dressed in white coats as they cooly analyze every wrinkle. The textures and colors of the clothing and period are at their best the on 35mm film. Costume designer Anaïs Romand’s work is amazing and even more impressive considering the lack of assistance from the brand’s archives. Part of the credit goes to historic consultant Olivier Châtenet, who pulled from his own collection of vintage Saint Laurent.

The sterile atelier is a world apart from the passions that consume Saint Laurent and come out in his work. The atelier in itself is part of a gorgeous set design by production designer Katia Wyszkop, created in a Parisian townhouse that included Saint Laurent’s multiple residences and places in the film. The atelier in the film was also the costume construction shop for the film. The production hired seamstresses both to make the costumes and to act. It is only with their hard work that Yves’ Ballet Russes collection of 1976, which he says in the film is his proudest achievement, is able to come to life.