SAINT LAURENT
★★★
It was in 1978 that Gore Vidal, peerlessly attuned to such matters, recognized a kind of self-consciousness emerging around beauty. “We now live in a relativist’s world,” he wrote, “where one man’s beauty is another man’s beast. This means that physical ugliness tends to be highly prized on the grounds that it would be not only cruel, but provocative for, let us say, a popular performer to look better than the plainest member of the audience.” Two years earlier, in 1976, Yves Saint Laurent unveiled his “Russian Collection” — the apex, the culmination, of the designer’s fruitful career. Yves Saint Laurent (played by Gaspard Ulliel) couldn’t live in a relativist’s world. Indeed, his idea of beauty could never accommodate self-consciousness: it was held with far too much conviction.
Conviction of that sort may be rather old-fashioned at a time when everything, and taste perhaps most of all, has been rendered thoroughly democratic. But Bertrand Bonello’s new biopic, Saint Laurent, makes conviction seem quite appealing. Bonello conceives it as the designer’s (played by Gaspard Ulliel) animating force: along the drafting table, his pencil glides with confidence, impressing on paper what one imagines is clear and true in his mind. Saint Laurent’s was not, at least at its height, a tortured artist. In fact, in the workshop he seems almost aloof. In 1974, Bonello finds him sketching idly away, listening to Mozart and downing spoonfuls of chocolate mousse, as the clutch of seamstresses at his mercy toil near tears in the other room; one misap- plied stitch, one baggy seam, and this diligent crew has failed to realize the perfection of Saint Laurent’s platonic ideal. That’s what is mainly illustrated about the YSL design process: the man knows precisely what he wants.
Bonello’s interest in Saint Laurent is divided neatly in two. On the one side struts and poses the procedural stuff, like our glimpses of the workshop, scrutinized with intriguing rigour. A midfilm stroll into the executive boardroom, as Saint Lau- rent’s lover and business partner Pierre Berge (Jérémie Renier) spars in translation with investors, proves a highlight — just the sort of candid behind-the-scenes peek at high-fashion process one sufficiently interested in the subject ought to crave. On the other side, more tantalizingly, slinks and throbs the famed Saint Laurent nightlife, and it’s here that Bonello feels most on form. One could hardly tell the story of Yves Saint Laurent without indulging the social and sexual fervour of his private life — it would be like making an F. Scott Fitzgerald movie that didn’t mention booze. And for those eager to luxuriate in the edenic charms of France in the late 1960s, Bonello is only happy to oblige.
Saint Laurent is not, in most respects, a conventional biopic — indeed, it often seems intent to actively undermine the genre’s most shopworn clichés. A few canny references to Proust — YSL checks into a hotel, in the film’s opening scene, as “Mr. Swann” — ought to give you some idea of the film’s relationship to memory and time, a structural gambit that, while sometimes off-puttingly amorphous, in the very least sidesteps the traditional life-story beats. But Bonello is not above occasional concessions to the conventions of the form. A letter read in voice-over from Andy Warhol, while no doubt cleaving to the facts, carries with it the usual air of historical importance, and it verges perilously close to pandering. (Same goes for an offhanded and uncharacteristically winking reference to Marguerite Duras.) Then, of course, there’s the traditional cautionary-tale turn: as YSL takes up with the irresistible Jacques de Bascher (Louis Garrel), the drugs get heavier and the consequences, naturally, become commensurately severe. Why, yes, drugs are bad. One could probably do without seeing the de- signer’s poor pet dog gobbling down a pile of errant pills and dying horribly on the floor. (An invention of Bonello’s, incidentally.)
But these are minor blemishes. And they are handily eclipsed by the film’s most ecstatic moments. My favourite finds Saint Laurent at a hip Parisian nightclub, staring fixedly at a young blond model, Betty Catroux (Aymeline Valade), sitting and smoking at a table on the other side of the room. Suddenly she stands, marches onto the dance floor, and, as the camera tilts up to frame her before a mirrored ceiling, lets down her hair and hurls herself into dance. It’s a ravishing moment, and one that allows us to see the world as Yves Saint Laurent sees it: as tremendously, inarguably beautiful, no self-consciousness needed. His conviction in his eye extended well beyond the walls of the workshop — even onto the dance floor. And for a breathtaking moment, we share it. ★★★
Saint Laurent opens wide on May 22.