the seminarian and the madman
by
Douglas Messerli
Jacques
Fieschi. Jalil Lespert, Jérémie Guez and Marie-Pierre Huster (writers, based on
Laurence Benaïm’s Yves Saint Laurent),
Jilil Lespert (director) Yves Saint
Laurent / 2014
Jilil
Lespert’s 2014 film on the life of French clothes designer Yves Saint Laurent
is, at least according to the standard biographies of the subject, fairly
accurate, although it is clear that much of it is from the viewpoint of Saint
Laurent’s manager/lover Pierre Bergé.
Eventually I’d like to see a film made
about Bergé himself, who, on his first day in Paris served as a human buffer as
the great poet and film-scripter, Jacques Prévert who fell at his feet him from
a window as Bergé moved out on a stroll down the Champs-Élysées!
At the age of 18 in La Rochelle, I decided to leave my family.
The day I arrived in Paris, I went for a walk on the Champs-Elysées
when suddenly I saw a man go through a French window, fall
through the air, grab at a store sign and crash at my feet. He was
bleeding profusely. An ambulance arrived and took him to
Marmottan hospital. The next day, I discovered in the newspapers
that it had been Jacques Prévert. I have always considered it an
omen that the same day I got to Paris, a poet fell on my head.
The day I arrived in Paris, I went for a walk on the Champs-Elysées
when suddenly I saw a man go through a French window, fall
through the air, grab at a store sign and crash at my feet. He was
bleeding profusely. An ambulance arrived and took him to
Marmottan hospital. The next day, I discovered in the newspapers
that it had been Jacques Prévert. I have always considered it an
omen that the same day I got to Paris, a poet fell on my head.
Prévert went
into a coma, and was near death, but did survive.
That relationship, which is at the
center of Lespert’s film, was certainly a turbulent one, with Bergé (Guillaume
Gallienne)—serving as the saner front-man for the often and increasingly
fragile Saint Laurent (Pierre Niney), who despite his first great success at Dior
was soon after exiled from the Avenue Montaigne couture heaven with the excuse
of the designer’s having been called up for the military (an impossible
position for Saint Laurent, particularly had he been called to serve in his
native Algeria, fighting to save the very French privileged world in which he
grown up). The designer had what was clearly a nervous breakdown, perhaps
initiated through drugs and a diagnosis of bi-polar behavior by the military
hospital in which he was interred; but again it was Bergé who came to the
rescue, demanding the his lover chose between life or death, sanity or madness.
Saint Laurent chose work.
Yet, it is clear, even in Lespert’s
Bergé-approved film, that his protection of the young, always-sensitive—yet,
admittedly, “not always nice” artiste—led to resentments among Saint Laurent’s
long-time friends and employees, including some of his models such as Loulou de la Falaise (who plays herself). Some even
described Bergé negatively as "the pimp who's found his all-star
hooker."
And then, as time moved on, and Saint
Laurent had numerous successes through his Mondrian shift dress, his Sharienne
safari jacket, the “Le Smoking trouser suit, Catherine Deneuve’s wardrobe from Belle de Jour, and his numerous kaftans
and other lighter wear, influenced by the fact that he and Pierre had
established a second home in Marrakech, Morocco, became the CEO of Saint
Laurent’s house.
Saint Laurent had, meanwhile, taken up
with Karl Lagerfield’s (Nikolai Kinski) boyfriend, the equally troubled Jacques
de Bascher (Xavier Lafitte), which further resulted in the life-long hatred
between the two competing designers. Yet Bergé’s love remained, and in 2008, a
few days before Saint Laurent’s death of brain cancer (the diagnosis of which
Bergé had kept from his former lover—who argued, along with several other
friends and the doctor, that Saint Laurent would not have been able to psychologically
deal with the truth) the couple were joined in a civil ceremony of a same-sex
marriage. And it was Bergé who took over their vast art collections—which sold
for millions after Saint Laurent’s death—and who became the head of the Fondation
Pierre Bergé—Yves Saint Laurent, which loaned out the real costumes to help
make Lespert’s movie.
Los Angeles,
August 11, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment