Yves St. Laurent documentary lacks the soul of its subject

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Yves Saint Laurent in Marrakech home.

The life of legendary fashion designer Yves St. Laurent is certainly worthy of a documentary, but this film by Pierre Thorreton is not it.

As pretty and frustrating as one of YSL's peek-a-boo blouses, L'amour fou offers only tantalizing glimpses of the man through the prism of his lover, companion and business partner, Pierre Bergé.

The dynamic of the relationship is a familiar tale in the realm of art. Where St. Laurent possessed -- and was often crippled by -- the neurosis of his genius, Bergé acted as the rock-solid friend and enabler.

In that capacity, the film offers desultory historic footage from St. Laurent's days as the apprentice/heir apparent to Christian Dior, through his jet-set days in the '70s and up to his malaise-ridden finale. Occasionally, a couple of St. Laurent's "muses" -- former model Betty Catroux and the sublimely-monickered Loulou de la Falaise -- offer their remembrances.

But when all is said and done, director Thorreton is distracted by St. Laurent's stuff.

It is glorious stuff, to be sure. After St. Laurent's death in 2008, Bergé put their accumulated art treasures up for auction. Thorreton frequently puts the brakes on the documentary narrative for loving, lingering looks at their objets d'art and the sumptuously appointed houses and apartments they kept in Paris, Marrakech and the especially beautiful Château Gabriel in Benerville-sur-Mer (where each room was designed to reflect one of the characters in the works of Marcel Proust, St. Laurent's favourite author).

Then he lingers just as long to watch the stuff being packed up and hauled to the auction house, where it sold for in excess of Cdn $475 million.

I had to find that out for myself. Thorreton, apparently under the impression that mentioning the auction's payoff would be crass, avoids the bottom line, even after devoting all that footage to it.

Lacking even basic journalistic instincts, Thorreton is so enamoured of gazing at the artworks through the camera lens, he ignores some interesting stories about them. For example, he shows a pair of 18th-century bronze Chinese zodiac sculptures of a rabbit's head and a rat's head, being readied for auction, but he neglects the story of how a representative of China's National Treasures Fund successfully bid more than $20 million for them, but refused to pay in a bizarre attempt to repatriate the sculptures back to China (they were looted from China's famed Old Summer Palace by French and English soldiers in 1860.) Thorreton mentions that Chinese representatives opposed naming the YSL trademark fragrance as Opium back in the '70s, but he neglects this altogether more pertinent information.

Thorreton is just as careless with St. Laurent himself. We learn that St. Laurent was conscripted into the French army while working at Dior, but we never hear of how his abbreviated three-week experience may have traumatized him for decades to come. He reportedly suffered a nervous breakdown due to the hazing he endured from his fellow French soldiers, but that event is not reported here, even if St. Laurent himself attributed many of his subsequent emotional problems to his truncated military experience.

In fact, the emphasis here is very much on Pierre Bergé, who seems happy to finally get the attention denied him while he was partnered with the brilliant, volatile St. Laurent. Early in the film, Bergé asserts that if he had predeceased his partner, St. Laurent would never have been able to part with the art collection and would have died with it, while Bergé easily liquidated it because he believes that neither art works nor humans possess a "soul."

And neither does this film.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Movie review

L'amour fou

• Directed by Pierre Thorreton
• Cinematheque
• PG
• 98 minutes
• 2 stars out of five

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 9, 2011 D3