“Yves Saint Laurent,” the
movie, isn’t nearly so innovative or forward thinking. It’s a tasteful
and formulaic biopic, visually lush but emotionally shallow. 
Director and co-writer Jalil Lespert
traces Saint Laurent’s life and work from the late 1950s in Paris, when
the designer took over as artistic director of the legendary House of
Dior at age 21, to the late 1970s, when his health was beginning to wane
following decades of mental illness and substance abuse. 
With his lanky frame and those trademark spectacles, Pierre Niney bears a striking resemblance to the designer and he does a solid job of inhabiting a legendary figure through various states in his life and looks over the decades. We see him fall in and out of love, assert his voice through an array of influential looks, attend coke-fueled orgies and rage against anyone who dares to second guess him or hold him back.
If
you didn’t know anything about this major creative force, this is at
least a decent introduction. But it doesn’t dig very deep to reveal what
inspired and drove him. The drugs? The men? The adulation? As is so
often the case in depicting the life of a famous, tortured artist, “Yves
Saint Laurent” shows us the emotional highs and lows and the
self-destructive ways in which Saint Laurent sought balance and control.
But the complex soul at the film’s center—a prim and shy enfant
terrible—remains elusive.
Plenty of people tell us what a genius Saint Laurent was—namely, his longtime lover and business partner, Pierre Berge (Guillaume Gallienne),
who is saddled with the task of explaining everything to us in
voiceover. In an unnecessary and unenlightening framing device, Berge
speaks directly to the late Saint Laurent as the couple’s extensive art
collection is being boxed up for auction. What he’s saying adds nothing
to what we’re already seeing on the screen, and Lespert uses it so
inconsistently that it doesn’t even register as a poignant source of
longing and sorrow.
The vast majority of the script, which Lespert wrote with Marie-Pierre Huster and Jacques Fieschi,
takes place in flashback—from Saint Laurent’s early sketches as a
radiant 19-year-old growing up in Algiers to a 1976 fashion show where
he can barely stand up, much less receive applause on the catwalk.
Through
it all, Berge is at his side, both promoting and protecting him. An
arts patron, he’s instantly attracted to Saint Laurent personally and
professionally. Their early days are affectionate, playful, even a
little animalistic; the matter-of-fact physicality they share is
refreshing to see, even in an art-house movie. 
But an assortment
of people—male and female—threatens to come between them and drag Saint
Laurent away from his purpose. Among them are muses Loulou de la Falaise
(Laura Smet) and Betty Catroux (Marie de Villepin), as well as Saint Laurent’s friend and competitor Karl Lagerfeld (Nikolai Kinski),
but it’s hard to tell what impact any of these people had on his actual
work. They’re hangers-on more than anything else. Niney does enjoy some
sassy, flirty interludes (as well as one explosive confrontation) with
Charlotte Le Bon as the model/muse of Saint Laurent’s younger days.
And
the costume design—a combination of original pieces on loan from Saint
Laurent and Berge’s foundation and period reproductions from Madeline
Fontaine—is as chic, elegant and luxurious and you’d hope. We see the
bold tuxedos for women and the Mondrian-inspired color block dress. In
one memorable, early moment, Saint Laurent takes a basic black cocktail
dress and makes it something daring and original with just the addition
of a white sash and bow arranged prominently at the front. The greatness
is on display, but only in glimmers. 
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