SAINT LAURENT
DIRECTOR: Bertrand Bonello
CAST: Gaspard Uliel, Jérémie Renier, Louis Garrel, Aymeline Valade, Léa Sedoux, Amira Casar, Helmet Berger
CLASSIFICATION: 16 SND
RUNNING TIME: 150 minutes
RATING: **
Too long, filled with gorgeous costumes, posing models and lots of smoke, this biopic of Yves Saint Laurent is flamboyant, but tedious.
While it paints a luscious and graphic picture of the designer’s creative process, you don’t learn much about his motivation, hopes, dreams or inspiration.
Instead, you are shown that Saint Laurent (Uliel, pictured) was an incredibly well- dressed man, always immaculately turned out, with a huge creative bent. Which, face it, anyone who professes a passing knowledge of fashion would have told you anyway.
The film starts with a tired, burnt-out Saint Laurent checking into a Paris hotel under an assumed name and calling up a reporter for a tell-all story… which then doesn’t happen.
Chronologically, the film moves in fits and starts, episodically presenting his life as divided by spring or autumn fashion shows, concentrating on the period when his career was at its highpoint at the end of the ’60s to the mid ’70s. The last few scenes are interspersed with an old Saint Laurent, just before his death in 2008.
Gaspard Uliel floats through the movie, creating a character that is almost removed from his own life. This Saint Laurent comes across as bored with everything, eccentric and pretentious as all heck.
On the surface Saint Laurent’s life is presented as one of closet gay encounters, sharpened pencils, lots of recreational drugs interspersed with clubbing at the same spot for years, surrounded by the same people. Despite all the vices, it doesn’t come across as a very dramatic life though.
Glossily beautiful, filled with objet d’art yes, but dramatically inert if this film is anything to go by. Yet, there are hints, like a mention of a bad experience in the Algerian War, or electroshock treatment.
The film gives us excess in so many ways – the bloated running time, multiple slow-mo cut-away scenes and split screens, lots of booze and drugs and orgies and more slow-mo scenes of models wafting down staircases.
It takes very long to say that Saint Laurent suffered to make other people beautiful, though why he felt so tortured is not explained. It shows you all of this in an as gorgeous and beautifully-lit manner as possible though, to a rocking soundtrack. So, essentially, if this film is anything to go by, Saint Laurent’s life was a haute couture fashion show for real.
If you liked Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, you will like this.