Biopic hides the real YSL

FILM
Yves Saint Laurent (M)
Rating: 3.5
Pierre Niney, Guillaume Galliene, Charlotte Le Bon
DIRECTOR JALIL LESPERT

REVIEW PIP CHRISTMASS

French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent's long-time lover and business partner Pierre Berge once claimed that the great couturier had been "born with a nervous breakdown".

Psychologically and physically fragile since childhood, it seems that Saint Laurent could not reconcile the success and esteem bestowed upon him as a designer with his own deep-seated private torments.

That tormented private life - substance abuse problems, complex love affairs, a series of nervous breakdowns - should theoretically make for a meaty, multi-layered biopic. But while Yves Saint Laurent looks incredibly beautiful, with the handsome set design and costuming you would expect of a film that had direct access to the YSL archives, Jalil Lespert's film never really gets at the heart of what drove Saint Laurent to create, what inspired him to design, and just why he was considered so very important in the history of fashion (a trailblazer, he was one of the first designers to put women in trousers, virtually inventing the idea of the tuxedo suit for women).

A really good "portrait of an artist" - whether that be musician, painter, singer or, indeed, fashion designer - manages to meld the art with the life, showing how each feed into each other. This doesn't really happen in Yves Saint Laurent, because it focuses in on the troubled relationship between Berge and his protege almost to the detriment of any full understanding of why creating beautiful clothes was the only thing Saint Laurent seemed happy doing.

Given the level of involvement the real Berge had with this film - his Yves Saint Laurent Foundation was heavily involved in bringing the archives to life in a series of wonderful fashion parade scenes - it does tend to feel at times like something of a vanity project, a love letter to a partner now gone (Saint Laurent died in 2008) in which Berge is the long-suffering Rock of Gibraltar who slowly watches as his beloved is reduced, through a combination of emotional hypersensitivity and addictive behaviour, to a shell of a man.

Pierre Niney, as Saint Laurent, certainly has his physical likeness, and the nervous mannerisms - the anxious pushing up of spectacles, the slightly louche way of standing - down pat. He's excellent in the role, given the complexity of Saint Laurent's character, which combined intense shyness, moodiness and neurosis with sexual curiosity and charisma and a somewhat addictive nature all in one body.

Guillaume Gallienne is also solid as Berge, the man who enabled Saint Laurent to launch his own fashion house and freed him up to concentrate on the creative side while he took care of business.

And the first half of the film, which explores Saint Laurent's early career at Dior in the late 1950s and the artist/muse relationship he shared with his favourite model Victoire de Castellane (Charlotte Le Bon), is quite fascinating.

Ironically, it's when things start to heat up from a dramatic point of view - as Saint Laurent descends into the bohemian but ultimately self-destructive late 60s world of sex, drugs and drink - that the film starts to fall strangely flat and the script takes on a by-the- numbers aspect (here's Yves meeting his next lot of muses, Betty Catroux and Loulou de la Falaise; here's Yves sauntering around his Marrakech getaway; here's Yves getting wasted at another party, to Berge's intense disapproval).

And the finale is strangely abrupt, if poignant. The film chooses the 1976 Ballet Russes collection as its sending-off point perhaps because it was regarded as the pinnacle of the designer's career; from the early 80s onwards the designer became more and more reclusive, although he did not officially retire until 2002.

The hedonistic glamour of the 60s and 70s might have been over but Saint Laurent's life was not, so to finish at the creative, if not the personal, peak of his career is in a way to do the full life story a disservice, preserving a moment in time under frosted glass rather than acknowledging the life that goes on beyond the applause and adulation.