Review

Saint Laurent

Bertrand Bonello’s bio-pic Saint Laurent stars Gaspard Ulliel as the fashion designer.
Bertrand Bonello’s bio-pic Saint Laurent stars Gaspard Ulliel as the fashion designer.

Like an E! channel reality show or an Instagram feed from the Met Gala, Bertrand Bonello's Saint Laurent beckons with the promise of an inside look at the hectic and mysterious world of fashion. Shepherding you past security with a flash of a VIP all-access pass, it confers instant insider status made even more alluring by the element of time travel.

You are transported into the workshops where Yves Saint Laurent designed his couture collections of the late 1960s and early '70s, and into the business meetings where his brand-extension strategies were hatched. After hours you follow the designer, in the company of friends, lovers and hangers-on, to Paris nightclubs and cruising areas, to Morocco and to bed. A few names are dropped -- Andy Warhol, Loulou de la Falaise -- but mostly you sweep through the parties and runway shows without stopping for introductions, as if you already knew everyone who mattered.

Saint Laurent

86 Cast: Gaspard Ulliel, Jeremie Renier, Lea Seydoux, Louis Garrel, Amira Casar, Aymeline Valade, Helmut Berger, Micha Lescot, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Valerie Donzelli, Jasmine Trinca, Dominique Sanda

Director: Bertrand Bonello

Rating: R

Running time: 150 minutes

It's a giddy, intoxicating, decidedly decadent feeling, but Saint Laurent is more than merely seductive. In dispensing with the usual plodding routines of the bio-pic, Bonello offers a perspective on his subject -- played in his prime by the epicene, hollow-cheeked Gaspard Ulliel -- that is at once intimate and detached. Beginning at a low moment in 1974, flashing back to the glory days of 1967 and later jumping ahead to Saint Laurent's final years (when he's played by Helmut Berger), the film is a compulsively detailed swirl of moods and impressions, intent on capturing the contradictions of the man and his times. Observations of Saint Laurent at work and in love give way to panoramic, intricate surveys of the world of commerce and culture in which he suffered and flourished.

The recent film that Saint Laurent most closely resembles may be Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner and not only by virtue of its 2 1/2-hour length, its episodic structure and the gorgeousness of its production design. Though their respective heroes could hardly be more different as physical or temperamental types, both movies confront the challenge of depicting an original creative spirit at work, and the paradoxical inability of one visual form to do justice to another. Though its products can be displayed, artistic talent is invisible: There is no way for Ulliel (or Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner) to dramatize the inner workings of genius, or for Leigh or Bonello to show their work from the inside out. The sketches and dresses that Saint Laurent produces are beautiful, of course, but we can't quite see where they came from.

What we can and do witness is Saint Laurent's absolute aesthetic confidence. He knows what is beautiful, and he believes, correctly, that the rest of the world will eventually see things his way. His fanatical, at times dictatorial, will ensures that outcome. Ulliel's Saint Laurent endures pain -- and brings pain to others -- but he never experiences a moment of doubt. He smokes, draws, drinks and watches the unfolding of history through his signature oversized glasses, conveying a haunting, quietly charismatic mixture of sensitivity and coldness. Saint Laurent is equally capable of casual, aristocratic cruelty and earthy, spontaneous tenderness, and when you study his face it can be hard to distinguish boredom from rapture.

He is the rarest orchid in a hothouse full of exotic blooms, as well as a few more ordinary horticultural specimens. Saint Laurent's most loyal friend, his lover and business partner, is Pierre Berge (Jeremie Renier), whose patience and pragmatism seem to guarantee that his heart will be broken. As the '60s wane, Saint Laurent takes up with Jacques de Bascher (Louis Garrel, even dreamier and hunkier than usual), who introduces him to harder drugs and kinkier sex. Saint Laurent's other companions and enablers include de la Falaise (Lea Seydoux) and the tall, blond model Betty Catroux (Aymeline Valade). Hanging out with them has its pleasures, its appalling moments and also its tiresome and confusing stretches. Bonello's rigorous indifference to the usual matters of plot is admirable, but it can sometimes test a viewer's patience. His films, shown in a recently concluded retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, are held together more by color, sensuality and atmosphere than by narrative or psychology. You could call them superficial, but only in the sense that Oscar Wilde might have understood the word: The surfaces are rich, complex and saturated with meaning. And this aesthetic, here as in earlier features like The Pornographer and House of Pleasures, can be suffocating as well as seductive.

But for just this reason, Saint Laurent may represent a perfect match of filmmaker and subject. Saint Laurent's commitment to elegance was all-consuming, and also represented a kind of transcendental consumerism. His life, or at least this movie's idea of it, was both sumptuous and empty, hedonistic and sad. He was a creator and, even more, a collector, of attractive people, intense experiences and beautiful things. To visit him in old age, surrounded by servants, memories, occasional hallucinations and abundant objets d'art, is to sit with a pharaoh in a tomb furnished for the afterlife. You're not sure if you've witnessed a tragedy in the guise of a fashion show, or the reverse.

MovieStyle on 06/26/2015

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