Just perfect...

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

A Masterpiece!

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

If you saw the 2011 documentary on Yves St Laurent, "L'Amour Fou' and found a disappoint hagiography (in fact a corporate YSL Foundation production signed off on by his former lover and business partner Pierre Berge ), try again with the new 'Yves St. Laurent'. This new 2 1/2 hour feature directed by Jalil Lespert is of a different order entirely. Where 'L'amour Fou' tried to hide rather than reveal, this f film it keeps no secrets and is as gritty and glorious as St. Laurent's life and work. (another biopic by Bertrand Bonello is in the works for sometime in the fall of 2015) The Lespert film opens in 1976 when St. Laurent is at the public peak of his career. He mysteriously checks into a Paris hotel room as Mr Swann . We next see him sitting on the bed, shirtless, back to the camera on the phone with a journalist 'ready' to give him 'the interview' which turns about to be about his personal 'disorders' . The Proust connection immediately signifies that this is the story not of a talented dress maker but of an exquisitely sensitive and deeply serious artist. But what are we to make of the grotesque story he tells the then tells the journalist about having been picked up as an Arab by the police then jailed and tortured?True or false? Delusion or play acting? As this time shifting film puts together the jigsaw story of the story of his rise and fall we eventually realize that whether or not it is a true story, this is a breaking point for St. Laurent. Art and commerce have collided and the sensitive boy-child who once fashioned intricate ball gowns for paper dolls has been crushed between the two. The film gives a clue in a 'fan' letter that St. Laurent receives in his first flush of success from Andy Warhol who extols them both as the greatest artists—the true revolutionaries— of their time.. But where Warhol operates from ironic distance, St. Laurent has no protective coloration. Warhol can call his studio 'The Factory' ; St.Laurent's atelier is a factory , the fantastically successful one built up by his lover and business partner Bergr. Here orders must be filled, both couture and ready -to -wear collections have come out on schedule. Dozens of white coated assistants constantly demand the attention of the shy faun like St Laurent who just wants to be alone with his classical music and the perfectly sharpened pencil and uniformly sized pieces of thick white paper from which his extraordinary creations will be born.Berge is both St. Laurent's saviour and unwitting Satan. Though presented sympathetically  - St Laurent is truly his true love --- the long business negotiations that we see have nothing to do with art and everything to do with money. By adroit management Berge has built the most successful fashion brand ever, given St. Laurent the success that any artist craves and financial and social benefits that he clearly enjoys. But it has also set the stage for his destruction.His escape from the pressure of production is the club culture of the high 70's. But again, where Warhol observed and documented the nights at Studio 54, St. Laurent is without resistance and is sucked under into a world of superficial beauty fuelled by drink and drugs. Bored now by Berge, he becomes obsessed with a new lover and who introduces him into what we now know as a deathly sexual subculture. Frail as he appears, St. Laurent is —-at least for while a survivor —- and he has one great collection coming out if a hallucinatory stay in Morocco But a complete breakdown inevitably comes —- but this time the white coats that surround him in the beautifully appointed psychiatric hospital are there to nurse and comfort him and he seems strangely at peace. Rumour has Laurent is pronounced dead prematurely . In a Paris newsroom the reporters discuss his obit and whether to talk about the drugs and other rumours . It's a moot point as he is he is alive though barely functioning. Now he has to be physically supported by his models as he takes a final bow for shows that he may or may not have actually designed himself. Our final view is of St. Laurent as an aging, puffy faced, vain and above all sad recluse . His last communication with Berge is a call telling him that they will get 350 million each for selling company. 'Good replies Laurent . "Now I can buy a Rothko" . Another artist irony. Both he and Rothko have filled the modern world with glorious beauty and both have found reality to much to bear. Rothko kills himself. St. Laurent still scratches away at his drawing but he produces nothing; in the end, he only acquires , barely breathing among the living dead.Note: this review is paired with another fashion film, 'Iris'. For that and more reviews see annepetrie.wordpress.com

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.

The worst movie after "Wilde" 1996 with Stephen Fry and Jude Law. The true about Great Yves St Laurent is in his works it is not in his sexuality. This movie is the second after Wilde that synthesizes two genres - biography with gay soft porno. As a cinema it is zero. We can watch it on the level of the texture - a big misunderstanding, lack of consistency that materialize the psychotic moment in life of Yves.But why this should be interesting, why this orgiastic presentation of the life of genius. I prefer Yves Saint Laurent Aufgehoben in movies, f.ex Visconti 's collaboration with Laurent- Berger, Joseph Losey's ("Romantic English Woman), Claude Lelouch, etc.The authors only superficially placed the topic of neurotic obsession, hysteria and they ferociously fail to do something with this, so why they mention it at all..use it or lose it. Again, not much to be said about such biographic soft porn melodrama. I am sure Berge and Slimane are dismissing the movie

about imperial ass-kissing. The film proclaims to be the closest to reality version of YSL's ascendancy and troubled middle years, what with all the couture and sketches from the archive, that had the approval of Mr. Berge. Also his astonishment by Niney's portrayal of YSL. And that should be enough.Yet the moment off-screen narration steps in, with the voice of an elderly version of Mr. Berge, as in an extension from his funeral eulogy for YSL, we are in deep, troubled waters. Is this a personal letter in the form of a movie feature length film? Does it inaugurate something new, something equal to its initiative, given the imperial gesture? The motive seems little more than ass-kissing. People may object that Mr. Berge has the same chauffeur for decades, and that tells something about the man, but you cannot go into film-making with that kind of mentality; at least, you cannot supervise it thoroughly. And the fact that he chose a first time director, instead of someone more experienced to handle such a dramatic life that calls for insight, should make us pause and think.As it is, Pierre Niney gives a wondrous impersonation; but this is not acting. The film soon derails after its beginnings, into a run-by-the-numbers descent into drugs, insecurity, jealousy, retaliation, beauty and second-rate shenanigans portrait of a couple's life that seems as interchangeable as any. Should we care for Mr. Berge's "sincerity" in exposing himself as a vindictive personality who wanted to control YSL's life by getting into his bed everybody the former cared for? Yes, we should care, by condemning this self-aggrandizement AND advertisement, for it is nothing else, and no one should buy into the "sincere" element of this loathsome behavior.But in order not to be abstractly moralistic, I will ground what I suggest in more detail: watch Gallieni's gaze that has something epicene, which the actual Begre surely lacks: this is a fictional detail that calls for unwarranted sympathy.For all the Marrakech scenery, the LSD sequence comes off as offensively unimaginative; clown faces in the camera, really? This severely undermines YSL's vision, who may have experimented with drugs but not like a deluded off-shore May '68 student: after his sojourn there he came back with the sublime scandal of the first see-through blouse. Where is that? Where is the '71 Occupation show scandal? Of all the references to his shows all we get is the famous and respected Russian one from 1976 that is presented in the film in a mortuary manner. And then the appearance of Berge's old age suddenly talking to a ghost. Please. Spare us the badly edited sanctimony.The film has only the fashion, the sketches, the lodgings and the artifacts to offer, but this does not amount to film exactly; the film feels introverted, with YSL's friends and court curiously lacklustre, with none whatsoever evocation of the era's scale, of the persons' complexity or/and vision, as if it all was a mundane party affair of a middle shots sensibility and eye for space and how people occupy and move around it. May the garden forgive and forget.One sincerely hopes that the forthcoming film about YSL, since it does not have the approval of Mr. Berge will deal with less archival respectability. I for one hope that it will deal, since it is yet again a young actor portraying YSL, with the guerre des dentelles (pauvre Lagerfeldt, by the way) in a less hammy manner. Who knows? Perhaps one day we will have a feature covering the 80's wars between Berge and Arnault, or one for the 1990 January show and its aftermath with the Opera Bastille opening with Les Troyens, with Aeneas flying from the fallen city of Troy and his ill-stared love for Dido. Tell me about some story-within-a-story operatic lace, not some Marrakech chewed up-scenery in a sophomore manner for the emperor.