Long-awaited and ambitious, this new movie by Jalil Lespert confronts the delicate exercise of the biopic and brings to the screen the creative, feminine, and troubled genius of the famous couturier Yves Saint Laurent, beautifully played by the young and charismatic actor Pierre Niney. From the outset, Pierre Bergé, his partner for almost fifty years (superbly played by Guillaume Gallienne), appears as the narrator of the movie: he’s the one who knows everything, who can tell us the secrets of Saint Laurent. Through his eyes the film becomes a declaration of dazzling and explicit love. Thanks to great documenting work, the film shoulders an almost didactic function and unveils the dark facets of Yves Saint Laurent. From the drugs to the fashion show backrooms, from the sentimental whims to the nighttime wandering, it blends the artistic trajectory of Saint Laurent with an authentic descent into hell. In the end it confirms the eternal myth of a genius whose perfectionism has been pushed to the extreme. Built on a succession of different scenes spanning Paris and Morocco, between the society parties and debauchery, the movie succeeds in depicting an eye opened to the Beauty—the eye of a brilliant artist who invented an archetype of the “woman,” audaciously reshaping the flapper aesthetic, the “woman” of Yves Saint Laurent.
