I’m very glad to be one of those privileged viewers who have already seen both recent biopics about Yves Saint Laurent: Jalil Lespert’s Yves Saint Laurent and Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent. This year’s Cannes contender featuring androgynous and charismatic Gaspard Ulliel in the lead divided the festival’s audience: some called it a plotless bore-and-snore devoid of any engaging energy, others (including the author) quite enjoyed its synthetic, slow feel, interpreting it as quite successful, sensual attempt to embody the spirit of the cult designer’s artistry and talent. Lespert’s film is on the other side of the scale: a classically narrated and constructed, visually transparent biopic that might be clearer in delivering facts and dates, but, despite a quite satisfying performance by Pierre Niney, falls flat.
Niney is quite appealing in the lead, but I cannot help but compare him with Ulliel, who’s a clear winner in this battle. Maybe because he’s younger (25 vs. 29) or simply has a more youthful, innocent image, Niney fails to embody his charater’s hesitation, the despair, the neverending struggle to prevent himself from crumbling. He’s convincing when playful, timid, or quarrelsome, but cannot reach the somehow psychopathic/sociopathic, demonic level of emotions Ulliel connected with. He hit a perfect 10, portraying a psyche tormented by a self-distructive drive that fuels all the inner light and darkness simultaneously, creating an endless conflict that sometimes bears beautiful fruit, yet most of the time remains an unbearable burden.
In all honesty, it’s worth mentioning that the information about the legendary designer cannot be freely accessed and interpreted: it’s still being protected by Laurent’s partner, and the heir of his empire, Pierre Bergé. As a sole dependent of Laurent’s oeuvre, he also functions as a censor, portioning the icon’s data and secrets. In this case, it seems like the picture the authors put together is slightly too influenced by those limitations therefore presents itself as conformist. To start with, Laurent’s and Bergé’s relationship started in the 60s yet – I know, we’re in oh-so-liberal France! – literally nobody seems to have a tiniest problem with it, not even the designer’s Algerian family…
It is not only because of Ulliel’s incredibly beautiful physique I cannot get the image of his body of my mind – in Bonello’s film, it was a separate character, a powerful, multi-shaped carrier of information about its owner. Here, the various aspects of Laurent’s homosexuality – and in fact, sexuality in general, not mentioning the naked, lustful, hurtful, and hurt body – are somehow obediently removed from our sight, not only unnecessarily sterilizing the cinematic environment and the image, but, more harmfully, twisting the reception of portrayed facts. We see the protagonist suffering after the military enrollment, but the reason given is him being fragile, while in fact he was voraciously bullied and harassed because of his psychosexual orientation. Laurent’s romance with Karl Lagerfeld’s partner Jacques de Bascher is completely removed from the storyline, giving room to heterosexual fascinations with his model friend, whom he might not carnally possess, but – all withing the frame of a jealousy power game – his boyfriend will.
To me, Lespert’s view is a reduced, if not false, image that distorts the truth about one of the most contradictory, inspiring, and original fashion artists and pop-cultural figures of the twentieth century. However flamboyant and colorful, Saint Laurent’s world also had a vast gray space and a powerful dark underpinning that the film fails to credibly present, therefore turning a genius’ multilayered existence into something closer to a Fashion TV pic: too expected, unoriginal and clean-cut. If Laurent’s designs were like Lespert’s film, the audience would never be watching a movie about his life today. Mediocrity was never of his interest.
