Yves Saint Laurent

I was recommended this movie by my sister who is, like many girls, really into fashion. For her Yves Saint-Laurent represents one of the great masters of fashion. A man that was born to make women look beautiful. Now that said, I really don't see anything in the movie a man who is not particularly into fashion could like about it. The story of YSL is boring at best. Not his actual life but the way he is portrayed. Falling into drugs at a pretty young age and not being able to ever keep it together during the majority of his life. He had a boyfriend/manager who is used as the person telling the story of the fashion legend. By the end of the movie, I don't know if you feel like you have find out loads of things about YSL that you didn't know, you are just left to wonder how his boyfriend put up with him for so long.

I have just watched Yves Saint Laurent and found it to be a visually sumptuous film which totally captures the dying days of the elite formal couture houses before bursting into the hedonism of modern global fashion brands. An excellent companion piece to L'Amour Fou (2010), giving an insight into the tempestuous but private relationship between YSL and Pierre Bergé through the pitch perfect acting of Pierre Niney (Yves) and Guillaume Gallienne (Pierre).

The film charts YSL's career from his early years at Dior in the late 1950s through to his iconic Ballet Russes collection of 1976. The world of the late 1950s is perfectly captured with elegant Dior designs, stylish models and a jazz score that matched the chic Parisian apartments the characters inhabit.

In one such apartment Yves meets Pierre Bergé, the man he will spend the rest of his life with both privately and professionally. For Pierre is the man who orchestrates the creation of YSL as a couture house. He gives Yves the confidence to "create on my own terms" and show the world his own particular view of feminine beauty and elegance.

Their relationship mirrors Giancarlo Giammetti and Valentino Garavani who together also created an iconic fashion house and sustained a personal relationship for over 50 years. Their story too is wonderfully and humorously captured in the documentary The Last Emperor (2008). However, one is left with a sense that Giancarlo and Valentino had a much more stable relationship to that of Yves and Pierre. The YSL movie captures during the 1960/70s Yves' erratic excesses with drugs and sex and Pierre's jealousy and need for control.

But this expose of their difficult relationship in no way detracts from the exquisite design throughout the movie. From the elegant, well documented interiors of Yves and Pierre's Parisian apartments, to the bohemian Moroccan lifestyle they enjoyed with the likes of Loulou de la Falaise and Karl Lagerfeld.

This film was a joy to watch with a standout performance by Pierre Niney, whose voice and mannerisms made Yves live once again.

YVES SAINT-LAURENT traces the career of the eponymous fashion designer (Pierre Niney) from his early days in the late Fifties to the zenith of his fame two decades later. The film concentrates on his professional as well as his personal struggles with long-time lover (and manager) Pierre Bergé (Guillaume Gallienne).

Director Jalil Lespert makes a lot out of Saint-Laurent's background as an outsider; born in Algeria during the colonial period, he never really felt at home in mainstream Parisian society. He began his career by following existing fashion patterns; but after being dismissed as "boring," immediately after leaving the house of Dior (Patrice Thibaud) he branched out on his own. This proved a wise move, as the film shows how he shot to stardom with a series of daring and often innovatory designs. There are several shots of Saint-Laurent working on his new creations day and night, to the despair of Pierre.

YVES SAINT-LAURENT offers a sumptuous recreation of Fifties and Sixties Parisian society. Deliberately shot in washed-out colors, the film conjures up a lost world of large saloon cars, packed streets and never-ending parties where Saint-Laurent spent most of his leisure-time. The models' hairstyles are deliberately ostentatious, especially that of principal mannequin Victoire (Charlotte Le Bon) who at first attracts and then repels Saint- Laurent.

Lespert's film doesn't tell us much about Saint-Laurent's life, other than the fact that he was something of a tortured genius, always on the lookout for personal as well as professional satisfaction but never seeming to find it. He enjoys a close relationship with his mother (Marianne Basler), and later on in life he always runs back to Pierre for emotional as well as professional support. With his black horn-rimmed lenses and increasingly disheveled hair-styles, Niney gives a convincing portrayal of the designed. On the other hand, perhaps the script should have offered more insight into how Saint-Laurent became such an iconic figure of the fashion world; what was it about him that made him so popular with both high society and the ordinary consumer.

As Pierre, Galienne has to make the best of a supporting role, and succeeds brilliantly. He comes across as a patient person, ever ready to forgive Saint-Laurent's excesses; but nonetheless dedicated to the fledgling fashion-house's future success. In several backstage sequences he is shown managing the models, designers and other assorted hangers-on with quiet efficiency, clipboard in hand. It was mostly down to his efforts that the house of Saint-Laurent enjoyed its global success; without him, the designer might have only had limited appeal.

YVES SAINT-LAURENT is definitely watchable - some of the party- scenes where the hero enters a drug-filled world of fantasy and hallucination - are particularly memorably shot. But I still think the film represents something of a missed opportunity to dramatize the life of an icon.

This film tells the life of the great French fashion designer, Yves Saint Laurent, concentrating on his youthful but turbulent years in Paris and Morocco.

"Yves Saint Laurent" has certainly a lot of beautiful clothes and beautiful people, but it's not enough to be a good biographical film. The story is presented as a recollection from Mr Berge's perspective, with him occasionally narrating to fill in the gaps. The story runs too fast for viewers to gain understanding with the eventful life of Yves Saint Laurent, and the story does not dive deep enough for any emotional connection to occur. Events are not presented in an engaging manner. I guess that's a necessary evil for a biographical film because compressing years into less than two hours is not an easy job. Skimming stones is quite expected.

Becoming a trend-setter in the fashion industry can be quite the challenge, but making a fashion movie with some cinematic and historical merit is the real challenge many have been willing to accept, and have failed miserably. Even though there are so many irreplaceable names within fashion with such interesting stories to tell (Dior, Arden, Versace, Ford, Varvatos, Gucci and Chanel to name a few), director Jalil Lespert chooses Yves Saint Laurent; one of the few fashion icons to have his pieces of high fashion and considerably iconic art pieces displayed in museums and prestigious art galleries around the world. Yet, with Yves Saint Laurent, we aren't quite sure if that is simply enough for a biopic of this stature.

Lacking any real panache and coming undone at the poorly constructed narrative seams, Yves Saint Laurent becomes a retro-fitted cinematic mess that, similar to many of Luarent's pieces, is more fun to look at than to wear, or in this case, follow narratively. Yves Saint Laurent depicts the tormented life of a genius, torn apart by the luxuries of high living and fame at too young an age. While Laurent could never possibly be taken away from being a visionary, his newest film by veteran French actor Jalil Lespert focuses more on its grainy, melancholic exterior than it does with coherently telling the story of one of the most revolutionary haute couture designers of the mid-1900's.

One of Lespert's greatest facilitators of telling Laurent's story is sex, and his story begins at the tender age of a twenty-one when Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent (Pierre Niney) was simply the assistant to Christian Dior. Lespert's film is a daunting task of understanding the ambiguity of silence and the mixed feelings of Laurent, who makes advances to his female friend and model Victoire Doutreleau (Charlotte Le Bon), yet exchanges undressing glares to his Algerian male gardener–this introduction of the film really throws audiences off. Thankfully, the slight glimmer of brilliance that is Lespert's film is understood fully once it is revealed that Laurent is a homosexual, and falls in love with Pierre Bergé (Guillaume Gallienne) in a seamlessly idyllic visit to a friend's Northern villa. Although Laurent's marriage to Bergé is never seen on film, rather, the tyrannical disputes of power within Laurent's fashion empire and the constant sexual espionage between the couple is used to replace some of the fluffy, real life moments between the couple, the real life Bergé applauded the film for being a rather authentic look of the life of he and his questionable true love. It's too bad Lespert's film is ruined with an annoying voice-over narration that reveals the film as B-grade cinema rather than stuffy, fine-French cinema couture.

Lespert is keen on making it clear that, Laurent had always led a privileged life, despite the horrors occurring in Oran, French Algeria (his birthplace) at the time of the late 1950's, and his family's move away from Algeria at the time and into France. Villa to villa, despite Laurent's apparent talent for fashion and designing, it shows just how much luck (good and bad), and being at the right place at the right time gave Laurent the opportunity to head the House of Dior, following Dior's sudden death at the age of fifty-two. But, the impact of the Algerian War of Independence doesn't stop there as it sucks Laurent back in when he is conscripted to join the French Army. Despite being the head of the House of Dior, Laurent enlists, only to be subjected to wide variety of medical tests that lead to illness, with tortuous means of remedy and an expulsion as Head Designer and a chance to head his own fashion house in the early 1960's, YSL.

One of Yves Saint Laurent's strengths as a film is showing the relationship between our self titled character and giving audiences a glimpse into the complicated life that he and his life partner, Bergé, really had. The heart of the film is seen between Niney and Gallienne, who give great insight on the chemistry between the great minds of such a powerful fashion brand and the inner workings of business geniuses, but a poorly matched couple. While watching the film, I couldn't help but notice how tasteful and well-constructed the scenes and relationship between Bergé and Laurent is highlighted, while earlier films this year, specifically the narratively crippled James Brown biopic Get On Up hardly gives justice to the complex inner workings of the business partnership and friendship between James Brown and notoriously anonymous Bobby Byrd.

I have to admit, up until the film introduces Laurent's muse Loulou de la Falaise, played by Laura Smet, I was confused, as I knew that Léa Seydoux (Blue is the Warmest Color) strolled the red carpet in Cannes earlier this year for her role as the infamous muse. Once I was out of the theatre and was able to check my smart phone, it became clear that indeed, Seydoux did play de la Falaise, but not in this Laurent film. Saint Laurent, the other Yves Saint Laurent film made this year, who made its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, will surely be a daunting competition for this film, seeing as it was embraced and accepted into the highest class film festival, while this Laurent film may very well be the department store version of the Laurent story.