Bertrand Bonello's Saint Laurent is an exquisite opium den, a biography of sensual feelings rather than of fact. Running at 150 minutes, the film is more interested in what Yves Saint Laurent senses, feels, imagines and dreams than the actual reality around him. Usually, a biopic of a personality strives to "humanise" the subject — we're supposed to see him/her at his best and worst, his genius and his foibles. Here, Bonello and his actor, Gaspard Ulliel, have done something more startling: they don't humanise Saint Laurent as much as sensualise him.
Gaspard Ulliel plays Yves Saint Laurent in biopic Saint Laurent.
This film makes the other biopic, Yves Saint Laurent and shown earlier this year in special screenings, look like a soap opera unworthy of the couturier's sophistication (that film was endorsed by the House of Saint Laurent, while this one wasn't). Saint Laurent — the title suggests this is a story of a saint, at one point his slashed, bloodied torso is even in full view — works like a beautiful drug that sweeps us through the woozy decade of the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. Billowing through the cultural transformations of France and of the Western world, it retells (or re-imagines) the life of the legendary stylist, also suggesting that Yves Saint Laurent is more than just an icon in the history of fashion, but also encapsulates the history of our sensual perception through the years.
The lush trance is punctuated by cloth-making scenes (almost documentary-like), cultural tectonic shifts (Duras, Deneuve, Truffaut, Warhol, May 68, Vietnam) and decade-defining soundtracks (The Velvet Underground, Maria Callas, CCR, Lee Fields). Through the neon-fog and LSD dreams emerges this man who's a Buddha statue as well as a Champagne flute, fragile yet unbreakable. Bonello's approach, which ditches the banal biopic structure of rise-and-fall-and-rise in favour of free-associative images and sensation, is the film's main strength. First we see YSL (Ulliel is very impressive) in 1973, checking into a hotel under the name Mr Swann — the Proustian references are integral to YSL's state of mind and his reliance on childhood memories. He briefly mentions his time in the Algerian War, though we don't see the action. Instead, the war he's fighting is interiorised, toxic, sumptuous and lifelong.
After that mysterious opening, the film exists somewhere in a state of floating. YSL is at the height of his power, so young, so gifted and so sad. He runs his successful haute couture house with Pierre Berge (Jeremie Renier), his partner in life and in business. Yves is the heart and soul of the house, but Pierre is the brains, and there's an odd, brilliant, eight-minute scene in which he negotiates a business deal with American moguls that would put The Social Network's glibness to shame (the editing is masterful).
Saint Laurent loves beautiful women, and here he has two muses in his orbit: Loulou (Lea Seydoux) and Betty (Aymeline Valade). The scenes where they dance in phosphorescent nightclubs — the camera is never reluctant to abandon the narrative to focus on faces at long stretches — defines the giddy, intoxicating decade these beautiful creatures inhabited.
A tedious way to describe Saint Laurent is that it's a story of a tortured genius; Bonello and Ulleil found a lucid way to do that without diminishing the sorrow that comes with being tortured and being a genius (as in the other YSL film). The period in Saint Laurent is probably the darkest in Yves's life, and by being dark, it's really dark — not because his nerves are too tight or his deadline for a new collection too pressing, but dark as in existential danger, as when one's realising that the only way to live is to put one foot on the edge of the abyss and look down.
YSL's drug-fuelled love affair with Jacques de Bascher (Louis Garrel, lewd and baroque) takes up a large chunk of the screen time, and the way the film shows Yves' teenager-like plunge into the abattoir of sex and oblivion — as an adult, he becomes a child of the 1970s — as they prowl Paris looking for muscular construction workers, preferably with North African names, we understand that perhaps this man needs light as much as he craves shadow. A saint who's going through fire, he's saved not by the blonde angels of Loulou and Betty, but by the stern pragmatism and business religiosity of Pierre Berge (they lived together until YSL's death in 2008; you might want to check out the documentary film L'Amour Fou from 2010).
With Proustian elegance, the film can be read as one long involuntary memory. Saint Laurent takes place mostly in the 60s and 70s, but what crowns it with a transformative momentum is the time-shift to 1989. Yves (now played by Hermut Berger, who at one point watches his young self in Visconti's The Damned on television, another meta-involuntary memory) is an old man who's also become, to his horror, an image, a brand. An outsized portrait of him can't fit into a van that's going to the Louvre — he dreads being in a museum because he's still alive. "But you already are in a museum," his friend reminds him. For all the heady stylisation, the film's sensual interpretation of this man's life is genuinely melancholic. In the final shot, Yves may smile his mysterious smile at the camera, but he has become history, and becoming history, to this man who wants to live, is the saddest ending of all.
