The Flawless Surface of Yves Saint Laurent

Toward the extremity of “Celebration,” a documentary capturing Yves Saint Laurent’s last years arsenic a moving designer, we ticker him get successful New York with his concern spouse and onetime lover, Pierre Bergé, for the 1999 C.F.D.A. Fashion Awards. Bergé—still blustery and energetic astatine sixty-eight—flanks Saint Laurent protectively arsenic the 2 permission their edifice for the ceremony, wherever the decorator is acceptable to person a lifetime-achievement award. Saint Laurent was lone sixty-two astatine the time, but helium looks overmuch older: frail and uncertain successful his tuxedo, helium totters down a hallway, anxiously licking his lips and smoothing backmost his too-thick headdress of shoe-polish-brown hair. “It’ll beryllium amended successful 3 hours,” Bergé tells him, arsenic if reassuring a child.

Onstage, Saint Laurent gives a abbreviated thank-you code successful halting English. Designers similar himself, helium says, indispensable behave similar artists, “sacrificing everything, sometimes adjacent our lives, to give ourselves lone to our work.” The assemblage gives him a lasting ovation, and Bergé appears cautiously relieved. But arsenic Saint Laurent begins to marque his unsteady mode retired of the banquet hall, Bergé rushes to his side, to assistance him. “He’ll fall,” helium frets.

“Celebration,” which was directed by the French filmmaker Olivier Meyrou, does a keen, subtle occupation of exploring the fissures betwixt representation and reality—between however things look and however they, successful fact, are. Saint Laurent, who died successful 2008, was possibly 1 of the twentieth century’s top designers. The creator of vivid, indelible fantasies for women to effort connected and to embody was besides a fragile and anguished man, troubled passim his beingness by alcohol, cause dependency, and bouts of debilitating depression. The documentary pays tribute to the designer’s genius: the seductive, unfussy flair of his designs is evident, for instance, successful footage from the monumental 1998 manner amusement that Yves Saint Laurent staged astatine the Stade de France, successful bid to commemorate the FIFA World Cup. But the film’s rubric is yet ironic. We ticker arsenic Saint Laurent is hustled, with immoderate effort, from 1 task to the adjacent by members of his team, who attempt, not ever successfully, to enactment a brave look connected things. He is inactive sketching his designs, inactive offering faint thoughts connected the creations that the petites mains—the house’s maestro seamstresses and artisans—will execute, but helium seems astir wholly mislaid successful his ain world. Rather than a celebration, the movie plays much similar a ceremonial procession, oregon possibly a bedside vigil for a antheral who has, indeed, seemingly sacrificed his beingness successful pursuit of his art. It’s a harrowing portrayal, and it’s not wholly astonishing that aft a azygous screening of the film, successful 2007, Bergé sued implicit an unauthorized image, blocking the movie’s merchandise for much than a decade.