Biopics, in the most traditional sense of the term, are typically the least effective way to cinematically capture a subject. Most egregiously, they attempt to squeeze an entire, complicated life into the small frame of a film, which ultimately leads to narrative clichés. How many times have you watched an artist portrayed on screen have an isolated creative epiphany, neatly connecting the dots from one famous work to another. Biopics seem to forget that lives are messy, and repetitive, and often incoherent. The trajectory is not always clear, and for a film to accurately portray a creative life it must take that into account within its formal and narrative structure.
“Saint Laurent,” Bertrand Bonello’s film about the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, which screened earlier this week at the New York Film Festival, works exactly for the reasons stated above. Mostly focusing on the decade between 1967 and 1977, a rich historical period marked by Saint Laurent’s most excessive designs and breathless atelier-to-disco lifestyle, the film is not bound to the rigidness of fact. “The point of research is to get ride of it,” the director said during a post-screening press conference, adding that he wanted his portrait of Saint Laurent to have a “point-of-view.” The film adheres to that dictum through its concentration on mood and process.
No artist lives in a bubble, and some of the best moments in Bonello’s film are the scenes of creation. Yves Saint Laurent (Gaspard Ulliel) has a team around him, including his close confidents Betty Catroux (Aymeline Valade) and Loulou de la Falaise (Léa Seydoux), his life-and-business partner Pierre Bergé (Jérémie Renier), and a barrage of seamstresses who help construct his elaborate designs. We see not just the moment of creation but the work that goes into manufacturing beauty.
The clothes, also, do not exist outside of time. They are the product of a unique period, and so much of “Saint Laurent” is about evoking the imbalanced ambience of that decade, sandwiched between the political turmoil of the 1960s and the go-go money-hungry greed of the 1980s. The clothes mirror the freedom in the air, beautifully represented by Bonello in a split-screen sequence that features newsreel footage smashed against models showcasing the designer’s clothes while descending down a long stairway. But like Bonello’s previous, Belle Epoque-set film “House of Pleasures,” there is a creeping feeling of a world fading away, and as the narrative progresses the portrait of Saint Laurent dissolves into something not unlike Proustian memory (the writer is a common reference point throughout the film), where the past unconsciously crashes with the present.
Visually, the film revels in the luxuriousness of Saint Laurent’s world, with a deeply rich color scheme (like the dark reds that adorn his home, which signal pleasure and danger) and subjective camera work that veers from reality to fantasy, especially in two club scenes: the first, our introduction to Catroux, focuses on Saint Laurent watching her on the dance floor, the camera slowly framing her from below as the sparkling rainbow lights flicker above; the second, our introduction to Saint Laurent’s brief lover Jacques de Bascher (Louis Garrel), a series of glances back and forth between the two captured by a camera that tracks quickly through the crowd.
The sense of finality is cemented late in the film with a jump to 1989, when Saint Laurent (now played by the veteran actor Helmut Berger) is living alone, a ghost surveying his own past. His home, once lavishly decorated, is now like a crypt, and the lyrics to “The Night” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, which soundtracked an earlier decadent part of the film, carries more weight. “As the night begins to turn your head around, you know you’re gonna lose more than you found.”
