A Tragic Genius: ‘Saint Laurent’ Exposes the Tensions Between Man and Brand

Yves Saint Laurent was the first modern designer to become a major French luxury brand, and a man who gave new meaning to those three words. Director Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent is as much about the man as it is about the brand, and how commerce can consume creative genius.

Yves Saint Laurent was prodigy, enfant terrible, and tragic hero all rolled into one, so perhaps it comes as no surprise that when it came time to tell his story on film, not everyone agreed on what should and shouldn’t be said.

Unsurprisingly, Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s life and business partner, was first to voice his discontent.

Bergé openly supported director Jalil Lespert’s film of the designer’s life, Yves Saint Laurent, which opened in France only months before Bonello’s film. By all accounts, Berge expected to be consulted with this second film, but when Bonello declined, Bergé balked at supporting it in any way. Bergé is the official guardian of Saint Laurent’s legacy and heads the Fondation Yves Saint Laurent Pierre Bergé.

In the film, Saint Laurent’s lifelong partner and business manager, Pierre Bergé, remains in the background but his considerable impact on the designer’s life and the creation of the brand are felt throughout.

Nevertheless, Bonello’s Saint Laurent is arguably the better film, simply because it doesn’t gloss over the designer’s demons, of which there were many, and which were intrinsic to his incredible genius as a designer. The film also lays bare the very real business dealings that not only catapulted the designer to fame, but also drove him to paranoid delusion and self-doubt.

While both films discuss Saint Laurent’s drug addiction and to varying degrees, his infidelities, Bonello’s film delves even deeper into the relationship between his creativity and the clinical depression which plagued him his entire life.

{ The film lays bare the very real business dealings that not only catapulted the designer to fame but also drove him to paranoid delusion and self-doubt. }

Bonello does not dismiss the role that of his muses, Loulou de la Falaise and Betty Catroux, who are portrayed as equally libertine and hedonistic.

Gaspard Ulliel, who portrays the designer, delivers a remarkably nuanced performance that captures the designer’s fragility and child-like innocence. We also come to understand the excruciating torment he felt and could not control.

“He was constantly going up and down and so this is what makes it fascinating for an actor to incarnate,” says Ulliel, whom we met along with director Bertrand Bonello when they were in town to promote the film at the San Francisco International Film Festival. “It is all of these paradoxical aspects of the character. It’s not only about studying what is white or black, but all the shades of grey in-between, all of the colors in-between.”

Unlike Lespert’s film, which focuses on Saint Laurent’s nascent rise following the death of Christian Dior, we meet the designer in 1967 when he is already fully developed and riding a wave of success with his bold ethnic prints, brocades and street-inspired collections. The ’68 riots in Paris only add fuel to his creativity and lead to the launch of “ready-to-wear”, a novel concept at the time, designed to make high fashion more accessible.

The film portrays the complicated romance between Saint Laurent and Jacques de Bascher, a louche, pseudo-aristocrat who took time out from his romance with Karl Lagerfeld to expose the designer to the dark underworld of sado-masochism and casual sex.

{ “The whole film is about this dialectic between art and commerce. It is about branding because this specific decade is just the time when branding became so important for the fashion industry.” — Gaspard Ulliel }

We also see how Bergé coddled the prodigy and fashions him into a legend well before such a title is even appropriate. Bergé is the entrepreneur, and even when Saint Laurent misbehaves, his gaze is equal parts heartbroken lover and calculating businessman.

“For me my subject was very much Yves, it was not Pierre and Yves,” says Director Bertrand Bonello. “When the film starts it is 1967 and they are a couple for 8 or 9 years. The brand has already been created so of course there is something very protective about him. At the same time that he [Bergé] saves him, he kills him.”

By the end of the film, we see Gaspard Ulliel remarkably transformed into the the much older Saint Laurent, when drugs and depression had turned him into a fragile recluse.

But Saint Laurent cannot survive without Bergé, and together their relationship grows increasingly symbiotic. Of course there are others who feed off of Saint Laurent’s fame: drug dealers, friends, muses, and doctors who, do little to abate his frantic need to balance those highs and lows.

When a dark and drug addled love affair with Karl Lagerfeld’s paramour, Jacques De Bascher (brilliantly played by Louis Garrel) unravels Saint Laurent to the point of near nervous breakdown, Bergé is forced to intervene –although it is unclear whether it is out of jealousy or to protect the Saint Laurent brand.

Perhaps it is both.

“The whole film is about this dialectic between art and commerce,” says Ulliel. “It is about branding because this specific decade is just the time when branding became so important for the fashion industry, and it is also the beginning of the fashion world we know today. At that time, it was all very different.”

For Bonello, Saint Laurent is about the brand that ate the man who inspired its very creation. “There is a line in the film, he [Saint Laurent] says, ‘Am I just becoming a lipstick?’ and there is something very attractive about that for him but also very depressing, because he was a designer and an artist, and then he is something sold in a supermarket. He is a trademark.”

>> READ OUR FULL INTERVIEW with Saint Laurent director Bertrand Bonello and star Gaspard Ulliel. Click here.

Leave a Reply

Click here to cancel reply.

You must be logged in to post a comment.