Lespert: Yves Saint Laurent (2014)

Yves Saint Laurent was the first of two biopics released about the fashion icon in 2014, and in some ways it’s closer to a traditional biopic than the more critically acclaimed Saint Laurent. Following Laurent (played by uncanny double Pierre Niney) from his earliest days working for Christian Dior through to the dominance of his own fashion house in the late 1970s, it’s narrated by his lifelong partner, Pierre Berge (Guillaime Gallienne), whose melancholy, bittersweet reflections set the tone for most of what transpires. On the one hand, it’s clear that Berge was devoted to Laurent, as well as being one of the first people to really recognise his genius, but, as the film tells it, Laurent wasn’t especially gracious or generous with returning his love, tending to wander away from Berge’s affection when he wasn’t utterly burned out from being in the spotlight for too long. As a result, one of the great strengths of the film is the way it dissociates Laurent from his fame, refraining from the kind of hedonistic expose you might expect from a high-profile fashion biopic to paint a version of Laurent as neurotic and nerdy in the extreme, albeit too awkward and ungainly to be a mere blushing beauty just waiting for a makeover either, as director Jalili Lespert positively buries Niney behind thicker and thicker glasses, trapping him in a manic depressive body that’s especially ill-equipped for the kind of decadence it was exposed to as Laurent’s star rose. For all that he longs for total, erotic intoxication, this version of Laurent simply doesn’t have the stamina for it, stumbling around like a dazed stick insect, and misplacing or displacing his sexual longings so laboriously that the film actually manages to generate a deep, smouldering and slow-burning eroticism – the kind of eroticism that can only start to emerge once sex scenes so consistently miss their mark. That’s not to say, of course, that it’s a clumsy film, since part of its power is how utterly Laurent transforms once he’s in his element, transfixing his models with such an exquisite sense of poise that it feels as if it’s directed by a fashion photographer. Although a great deal of it is set in the mid to late 70s, it never really feels as if it escapes the 60s – or at least the 60s popularised by Mad Men, a vision of the decade as a gradual congealment and distention of poise, pose and posture. Combined with the fact that Berge lent a staggering 77 vintage Laurent items to the film-makers, that often makes it feel as if the actors are merely mannequins in a mobile Laurent retrospective, which is perhaps how a period fashion piece should finally play, and perhaps why the film only really seems to come into its own during the catwalk segments, or when the mise-en-scene starts to resemble a fashion spread. In fact, as Laurent’s pret-a-porter style shifts into gear, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish between what’s a catwalk and what’s not, just as every space feels as if has to be ready to grace a fashion magazine at a moment’s notice, all of which tends to offset the staginess with a more provisional, improvisational atmosphere, turning what could have been a fairly functional, standardised biopic into something considerably looser, airier, ready-to-wear.