Critics reviews

It features Bonello’s finest auto-critque as the Saint Laurent showcase pieces of couture clothing are paraded before the camera on one-half of a split screen. On the other side is revolution and violence. The two inform each other, but they can never be equal.

French writer-director Bertrand Bonello is a master at setting a mood and evoking how events play out in memory, though his willful detachment from his subjects makes him an acquired taste... Like Bonello's House of Pleasures (2011), this takes place mainly in confined interiors and divulges tantalizingly little about how the characters relate to the outside world.

A shape-shifting journey through the life and career of Yves Saint Laurent, it probably won't teach you anything particularly new about the famous designer... Instead, Bonello gives us fragmented glimpses of key events in YSL's life — all in an effort to capture something ineffable about the man. I knew almost nothing about fashion going in, and I think I knew even less coming out. But I was still awed by the film.

Saint Laurent, Bertrand Bonello's anti-biopic on the fashion icon, is overlong and opaque, even boring in spots, but it contains long passages of real poetry. Given the conventional biopic treatment in last year's colorless Yves Saint Laurent, the designer (Gaspard Ulliel) is here painted as a cubist figure, all refracted angles.

[It] dodges the usual pitfalls of the biopic by concentrating on such a short period; indeed, its ending seems like a piss-take on that genre's clichés. One of two films on Saint Laurent made simultaneously, it's far superior to Jalil Lespert's Yves Saint Laurent.

For the vast majority of people who don't give a shit about fashion, it's easy to assume that Saint Laurent is a tedious hagiography about an intentionally vapid, disposable industry. Yet Bertrand Bonello's film shares more DNA with Olivier Assayas's Carlos than the September Issue (magazine or documentary), and prioritizes action, energy, and form over lengthy explications of history or psychology.

Investing YSL's memories as set pieces with a tenuous grip on time, Saint Laurent is also a supremely juicy work of big-screen entertainment with an acute pulse for drama... Saint Laurent interrogates YSL's allure while taking inventory of the insanely gaudy bric-a-brac that he surrounded himself with, allowing ponderous slow tracks that recall Burt Lancaster perusing the grounds of his fading empire in Luchino Visconti's The Leopard.

Bonello avoids many of the genre's most basic pitfalls, including facile psychoanalysis and the dreaded Wiki-checklist approach to a celebrity's milestones. But he still fails to crack the toughest biopic nut of them all: how to shape a human life into a compelling narrative. His solution is to throw style at the problem—apropos, given the subject, but that move can only disguise a vacuum for so long.

If you don't know much about Saint Laurent's life, you may find yourself lost: Bonello attempts a fractured, no-structure structure, and the risk doesn't pay off — the picture focuses largely on Saint Laurent's drug addiction and attraction to the wrong sorts of guys (chiefly Louis Garrel's dangerous boy-toy Jacques de Bascher), and doesn't come close to capturing his mercurial mystery.

The movie's best moments have a shivery eroticism and a trancelike intensity... [Bonello's] direction catches it only intermittently, especially in scenes with Saint Laurent's decadent lover, Jacques de Bascher (Louis Garrel), but the high-wire negotiations of Saint Laurent's partner in business and life, Pierre Bergé (Jérémie Renier), and the meticulous craftsmanship of the behind-the-scenes team, are often more cinematic.

[Bonello] captures disappearance in all his films—the dissolution of a couple in Something Organic(99), the fading ideals of an aging pornographer in The Pornographer (01), the end of an era embodied in a 19th-century Parisian brothel in the symphonic chamber drama House of Pleasures (11), or the disintegration of an artist, a genius of pure talent, swallowed up by his own ambitions and the society that deifies him, in his latest masterwork, the hypnotic and surreal Saint Laurent.

Saint Laurent is a memory movie with a splendidly idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and pace. Scenes variously play out with abrupt shifts or deliberative longueurs; the bold title cards that mark each change of year structure the narrative without delimiting neat, summarizable chapters.