Saint Laurent is a hedonistic and oh so fashionable romp

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. Saint Laurent 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. Saint Laurent’s was not, at least at its height, that of 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 misapplied stitch, one baggy seam, and this diligent crew has failed to realize the perfection of Saint Laurent’s ideal.

That’s what’s clear 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 mid-film stroll into the executive boardroom, as Saint Laurent’s lover and business partner Pierre Berge (Jeremie Renier) spars with investors, proves a highlight. 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 a Scott Fitzgerald movie that didn’t mention booze.

Saint Laurent is not, in most respects, a conventional biopic — indeed, it often seems intent to undermine the genre’s most shopworn cliches. There are a few minor blemishes but they are eclipsed by the film’s most ecstatic moments.