There is a lot to like about this film, which to my mind is superior to most documentaries about famous people. Instead of a parade of plausible-looking people ID'd at the bottom of the screen, telling us how wonderful the celebrated figure is, we have an acted-out story about a creative individual who, like many artists, has a complicated inner life. For those who were around during the early YSL years, it's fun to see the Mondrian-inspired dresses we all wore and to get snippets of life in the 60s and 70s. As a fiction writer, my special joy in seeing "Yves Saint Laurent" is that it's a rare film showing a creative person actually CREATING. For example, films about writers are shown in movies working at their art for, at most, a couple of seconds; a couple more seconds may be devoted to the writer thinking at his or her typewriter or computer, and crumpling paper. This film shows a man who draws and draws and draws and fusses mightily about the execution of his visions. In an era where, say, detectives in crime shows on TV type a couple of keys into a computer and come up with amazing information about the perp, I am thrilled to see a very gripping film about a person who is shown making a substantial, extended effort to do his best under internal and external pressures. Psychological complexity is hardly ever part of films about artists (I think of the appealing documentary, "Cutie and the Boxer," as a prime example). "Yves Saint Laurent" is a well-acted, gripping bio-pic that lets us view the inner and outer life of a major creator in the world of fashion.
