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Movie Review: L’amour fou

Gregory Fichter

Upon his death in 2008, famed fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent’s partner of fifty years Pierre Bergé was left to decide the fate of the couple’s massive fine art collection. In three palatial homes in France and Marrakesh, French Impressionism mingled with the modern geometrical colors of Piet Mondrian and sculpture by the Cubist master Georges Braque. By the end of L’amour fou – Pierre Thoretton’s documentary on the influential life and legacy of Saint-Laurent – all of these treasures will be sold off one by one at astronomical costs and the stoic Bergé will be left contemplating life alone in the Paradise the two have created.

Told in a traditional blending of still photos, 8mm footage, and the talking heads of his survivors, this tribute to Yves Saint-Laurent’s massive influence on twentieth century fashion and culture begins with the 1957 death of Saint-Laurent’s mentor: fashion pioneer Christian Dior. His young apprentice assumes control of the House of Dior and the shy, dapper boy of twenty-one introduces his first smash collection the next year. Saint-Laurent quickly developed a signature style that reshaped women’s couture in the decades to follow. In short snippets of footage, a meek young man behind thick glasses is juxtaposed with his daring, flamboyant clothing designs. After falling out of favor with the Dior Empire, Saint-Laurent opened his own house and the rest is history. One of his greatest breakthroughs was a mid-Sixties incorporation of the distinctive blocky primary colors of Dutch painter Mondrian into a mod dress design which caught fire and helped define that decade’s buoyant hipness. This leads us back to the real Mondrian paintings which laid the seeds of inspiration hanging in the now-abandoned home.

Bergé reflects on the personal comforts Saint-Laurent gained from finding new pieces to add to the collection in an extended interview he gave the day before everything was to be crated-up and shipped off to Christie’s auction house (a process given a little too much screen time to emphasize the ironic “business of art”). In Bergé, we find a stern, business-minded man obviously affected by the loss of the most important person in his life, even if they were more associates than lovers by the end. To the melancholy strains of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich the camera floats through lavish rooms in somber reverence for the creative energy that once emanated from the private offices of an icon. “Every man needs aesthetic ghosts in order to live,” muses Saint-Laurent in the retirement press conference which opens the film. In his private museum he collected such ghosts and drew inspiration from them. The filming of each room echoes that of Aleksandr Sokurov’s one-take wonder Russian Ark (2002) in which a great swath of Russian history is retold through a long tracking shot through the Hermitage Museum.

A helpful key to fully appreciate the layers of the filmmaker’s intentions (besides a passing interest in the subject) is some awareness of the author Marcel Proust and his literary experiments with memory. Saint-Laurent was a devotee of Proust’s sentimental epic In Search of Lost Time and it is insinuated that as he grew older he was seeking the perfect “Proustian Moment” that would illuminate one’s entire life, which led to an isolated retreat from the hedonism that was a pre-requisite of his fame. What emerges at the end of the film is a melancholic figure surrounded by celebrity royalty (Warhol, Jagger, and many others are seen in home movies) who grew increasingly anxious to get back to his private chambers and the ghosts he had yet to catch.

While the film is a reverent appreciation of Saint-Laurent’s pop culture epoch and a guarded insight into his private life, what is missing is the very thing that the title implies. “L’amour fou” is loosely translated as “impassioned love” or even something a bit more out-of-control. Aside from Moroccan vacation photos and a clip of Bergé’s eulogy at Saint-Laurent’s funeral, their relationship (certainly the most voyeuristically interesting element of this story) is kept at a distance, with anything tumultuous quickly dismissed and not given much detail. Saint-Laurent’s drug and alcohol addiction are also glossed over as a minor episode even though it was a twenty year fight. We are left with the feeling that an unauthorized account would be significantly livelier, but less soulful than what is offered by Saint-Laurent’s protective widow.

As each of the masterpieces takes their turn at auction, Bergé solemnly observes from a private room as the money piles up. Fast-paced and financially impressive, it is an exciting conclusion for L’amour fou, but one that has returned Saint-Laurent’s lifetime collection of precious objects d’art back to mere commodities. An air of tragedy lingers.

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Gregory Fichter

Greg toiled for years in the hallowed bowels of the legendary Thomas Video and has studied cinema as part of the Concentration for Film Studies and Aesthetics at Oakland University. He has hosted the cult movie night "Celluloid Sundays" at The Belmont in Hamtramck, MI. and enjoys everything from High Trash to Low Art.

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