Yves Saint Laurent directed by Jalil Lespert

          While getting older, I have found myself becoming increasingly more in love with fashion.  I have always had my own style, but I mean couture, high fashion looks.  Unfortunately, my wallet does not allow for elaborate spends.  Now and then, though, my wallet and I splurge, that time buying Michael Kors shoes or this time purchasing a Fossil bag and perhaps next time YSL perfume.  My lack of green in the bank does not stop me from enjoying window shopping in the luxurious shops or watching films of the artists behind the name create some of their most memorable work like Yves Saint Laurent.  Watching the 2014 French movie Yves Saint Laurent directed by Jalil Lespert put a face to the images of YSL high fashion clothing I had seen in the bizarre magazines.  The movie starts Yves Saint Laurent’s life as a young man just beginning to expand on his creative eye under the tutelage of Christian Dior.  After Dior’s death, we see the true commencement of the French designer’s long and prosperous career.  However, it isn’t all bells and whistles, with love and self-destruction to the ultimate end the man behind the curtains but by no means the end of his company.                          

          The director takes a closer look at Yves Saint Laurent’s relationship with long time business and romantic partner Pierre Berge more than he goes into the creative process of the man.  Like so many fashion designer movies like that of the French film Coco before Chanel directed by Anne Fontaine, understanding the creative process of an artist, you have to understand the life events and inspirational people and things that were the meaning behind such genius works.  Showing how people and the world’s expectations swayed Yves Saint Laurent into a spiral of drugs and alcohol gave the audience a truer knowledge of the designer rather than the image they see most often, the image of a controlled and elegant man who creates such inventive and beautiful fashion.  Hiding nothing from his audience, director Jalil Lespert dives deep into Yves Saint Laurent’s life that gave me true realization of how his life might have been like.  I am not familiar with the work that actors Pierre Niney, Guillaume Guillienne, or Charlotte Le Bon have done previously, but in this film, they represent their characters great with anger and joy that accompanied the ride of visionary Yves Saint Laurent.  If you want to step out of your English movies and watch a foreign film that will keep you captured the whole time (not only because of the need to read the subtitles), then this biography will not disappoint.