I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Fresh and Exciting

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

I thought this would be an interesting and exciting movie, was I wrong. The film maker makes the wild 1960s, the dull and boring 1960s. Frontal male nudity and gay sex is about as shocking as watching as a turtle slowly walking around the floor. There is no life to this film. No feelings. It is all show with long and dull scenes which are meant to be "earth shattering", but are just boring. A beautiful model is shown dancing by herself twice in a club in a nothing scene which goes on and on. A group of investors are shown talking in a room for an extremely dull ten minute scene with lousy acting, again void of any emotion. I give it a 4 out of 10 only for the beautiful women and lovely fashion. The acting and the screenplay rate a minus 100.

If you want to drown in a sea of poseurs and take two and one half hours to do it, then this flick is just your perfect rusty old skiff.Honestly two and one half hours of poseurs, poseurs, poseurs, poseurs. Poseurs smoking, smoking, smoking! Poseurs drinking, drinking, drinking. Poseurs on drugs, dope, drugs, dope, etc. Poseurs in elegant surroundings, fancy over decorated rooms. Poseurs in clothes that look like they were heisted from a mob bosses closet.Poseurs whispering, whispering, whispering! There is dialog in this flick but the entire cast seemed reluctant to actually speak it in a normal vocal tone. More poseurs, male, female. Party poseurs! Parties in very artsy settings. More lavish rooms for this cast of poseurs to be photographed in. And somewhere squeezed into this sea of monotonous poseurs is a story, an actual plot line. But you will drown long before you become aware of it!

I want to love this film - the acting is wonderful and the art direction is spectacular - the cinematography, locations, costuming, even the soundtrack. However, the story is disjointed and badly edited.It is also essential that the viewer knows the characters in YSL's life before seeing this film because there are many oblique references to people that will go over most people's heads and not enough explanation to understand who some of these people were and why they were so influential. There are also a couple of gratuitous nude scenes that cheapen the film because they look like a desperate attempt to win over an audience by exposing the considerable asset of the lead actor. The film also suffers from being a smidgen too long - I was restless in my chair by the end.Despite this, there are some excellent scenes in this film that are beautifully written, acted, and shot. The opening sequence in the workrooms in 1967 is elegant, the woman buying the pant suit is poignant, the party scenes at the discotheques in the 1960s and 1970s are exciting to watch, and the split screens with the fashions and newsreel films are clever. I couldn't help but think that a fresh edit might make this a much better film.

If you're new to the whole idea of Yves Saint Laurent, you'd probably like to watch the other movie, YSL by Jalil Lespert. It presents Yves' life in a fairly linear fashion, with reason and logic (and history, nonetheless) determining the scenes following one another, brightened by a wide range of characters of all types and colors. However, while watching it, I felt as if I would have been sitting at a boring History class with a boring old school teacher who was bored himself with what he was teaching. I'd name this History teacher Pierre Berge, Yves' long term companion and lover, as despite the film bearing the name Yves Saint Laurent, after Pierre is introduced 13 minutes into the movie, the whole perspective from which everything that happens is presented shifts, not sure if willingly or not. Either way, if I'm interested in Pierre's perspective, I should be watching a movie called Pierre Berge, right? Bertrand Bonello's version, SL, on the other hand, is everything YSL is not. It works not only as satisfying our (presupposed) need to know more about YSL's life, but it does it with style, while still being able to entertain, in a way a conscious filmmaker would do, who has a certain public in mind, to trigger their points of interest. We're talking about non-linear storytelling wrapped in a clever structure which stands far from messing us up with its seemingly disorganized, jumpy time line, but it adds color, life, and impression to the same skeleton that YSL just wasn't able to. YSL is more of a documentary consisting of reconstructed scenes, whereas with SL you have scenes that work within themselves, not only in the context of the whole movie. Here I felt the focus having been really put on his passion, the way he worked, his environment, his temper when he worked, his temper when he was off-work (still looking for models), the esteem and respect that was given to him by everyone who worked for him. The time period of 1968-1970 is presented in a highly ironic way, in the form of a split-screen, where on one side we see political events of the real world while on the other side we see models presenting the spring and autumn collections of a totally different high-end world, as suggested by the split screen, yet both of them occurring in the same year, in the same location. A home-party scene is reminiscent of Chabrol's scene of the same nature in Les Cousins (1959). We see impressionistic, abstract scenes and shots which instead of halting our flow, along with the excellently chosen, and used music engulfs us further in. On the other hand there's the business meeting scene with an American shareholder, in which the prolonged overlapping dialog of Pierre, the translator and the American suck us back into the realistic aspect of this seemingly dreamy world filled with art, beautiful women, and bohemian lifestyle. About one hour and a half into the movie the fourth wall is obliterated with a cute little reflexive scene which looks like a one-shot commercial. I could go on and on.Bonello's SL goes after your feelings, consciously and successfully using the language of cinema, with all its tricks up its sleeve, magically unraveling the magic of Yves.