L’Amour Fou (2010) Review

Documentaries about the lives of the famous are often incredibly dull and predictable. It’s a problem faced by documentarians and biographers alike when tackling their subject, because all human life is neatly divided up into a beginning (birth/early promise), middle (success), and end (death/legacy). This linearity of narrative is hard to break when writing about or making a film about an artist. So many documentaries plod along, showing us the early years of the artist, positing suggestions about their artistic development with the benefit of hindsight, skirting around their successes often through the eyes of second-hand observers, before making contrite statements about what their work means to us. How then does the biographer or filmmaker attempt originality under such constraints?

This is a problem neatly dealt with by director Pierre Thoretton in his documentary, L’Amour Fou (Mad Love) (2010), examining the life of famed French couturier and designer, Yves Saint Laurent. Rather than trotting out the usual clichés of the medium, Thoretton takes a different approach. With the assistance of YSL’s lifelong partner, Pierre Bergé, the film opens with a great auction of the paintings, sculptures, antiques, furniture, and miscellany that make up a long life of artistic appreciation. We join Bergé, now an old man who has suffered the loss of his partner (YSL died in 2008), presiding over the dismantling of the couple’s possessions, which are packed up to be auctioned by Christies in a once in a lifetime sale that would eventually raise a rumoured $477 million dollars.

These objects poignantly tell the story of the designer’s rise to fame and of the couples’ long history together. (As a side note, one wonders if this film was the inspiration behind Madonna’s biopic of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, W.E., 2012, which similarly examines their relationship via an auction of their belongings). Through the dismantling of their Paris apartment, one gets a sense of both Bergé’s personal loss and also the loss to fashion of this great artist. YSL’s psychology is examined in his relationship to Bergé and the spaces within which he lived, which included houses in both Morocco and Normandy. He was a visionary, an incredibly shy individual who changed the way women dressed forever. The pressure of producing jaw-dropping collections each year took a tremendous toll on him, becoming depressed and for a time, dependent on drugs and alcohol.

Unusually, L’Amour Fou abandons the reportage style often found in documentaries and opts for a wonderfully expansive, cinematic feel, with long swooping camera shots through empty houses and over landscapes. There is also a building sense of drama towards the denouement – the exciting auction. Perhaps the only criticism is that we see YSL resolutely from Bergé’s perspective. Bergé is of course, and quite naturally, his partner’s staunchest supporter but sometimes the documentary drifts into hagiography, giving us a one-sided view of an incredibly complex artist. But the audience forgives this because of Bergé’s candour and his willingness to open his homes and private life to the filmmakers. Thus, the documentary becomes a meditation on legacy and how the surviving individual in a long same-sex relationship (they were pioneers in a time when it wasn’t so acceptable) must find a way of grieving after their partner dies.

L’Amour Fou has sparked unprecedented interest in YSL’s life, with two film biopics this year attempting to dramatize his dizzy ascent in the fashion world and the ups and downs in his life. Yves Saint Laurent (2014) starring Pierre Niney, has been officially sanctioned and authorised by Bergé, though it has been met with mixed reviews. Another film, Saint Laurent (2014) features Gaspard Ulliel in the titular role and will be out in September. The battle for YSL’s legacy will no doubt rage on…