Yves Saint Laurent movie review (2014)
With his lanky frame and those trademark spectacles, Pierre Niney bears a striking resemblance to the designer and he does a solid job of inhabiting a legendary figure through various states in his life and looks over the decades. We see him fall in and out of love, assert his voice through an array of influential looks, attend coke-fueled orgies and rage against anyone who dares to second guess him or hold him back.
If you didn’t know anything about this major creative force, this is at least a decent introduction. But it doesn’t dig very deep to reveal what inspired and drove him. The drugs? The men? The adulation? As is so often the case in depicting the life of a famous, tortured artist, “Yves Saint Laurent” shows us the emotional highs and lows and the self-destructive ways in which Saint Laurent sought balance and control. But the complex soul at the film’s center—a prim and shy enfant terrible—remains elusive.
Plenty of people tell us what a genius Saint Laurent was—namely, his longtime lover and business partner, Pierre Berge (Guillaume Gallienne), who is saddled with the task of explaining everything to us in voiceover. In an unnecessary and unenlightening framing device, Berge speaks directly to the late Saint Laurent as the couple’s extensive art collection is being boxed up for auction. What he’s saying adds nothing to what we’re already seeing on the screen, and Lespert uses it so inconsistently that it doesn’t even register as a poignant source of longing and sorrow.
The vast majority of the script, which Lespert wrote with Marie-Pierre Huster and Jacques Fieschi, takes place in flashback—from Saint Laurent’s early sketches as a radiant 19-year-old growing up in Algiers to a 1976 fashion show where he can barely stand up, much less receive applause on the catwalk.
Through it all, Berge is at his side, both promoting and protecting him. An arts patron, he’s instantly attracted to Saint Laurent personally and professionally. Their early days are affectionate, playful, even a little animalistic; the matter-of-fact physicality they share is refreshing to see, even in an art-house movie.
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