Saint Laurent

Originally published on 05/11/23 on Letterboxd

Delirium distilled- a twisted, ugly, gorgeous aesthetic object that is at once overwhelmed and totally unburdened by the weight of histories political and artistic. I think about the scene where Garrel (who- it must be said- is as beautiful here as he’s ever been) and Ulliel carry on an entire conversation through glances alone more than I do about most things. The nakedly personal here is the nakedly political- turmoil unfolds as transformation, where the chrysalis of bourgeois decadence unfurls into something far more destructive and careless. That is exemplified most succinctly in that magnificent split-screen montage towards the beginning, which links the May ‘68 fallout so pointedly with the gradual erosion of YSL (in its own way a protest against aesthetic conformity, albeit one with aims far more reserved than that of the student riots) into a faceless corporate identifier, at once robbed from and willingly relinquished by the artist at its heart. 

In literal and figurative terms, Bonello’s film is a hall of mirrors, where reflections are perpetuated until they can keep up illusions no longer and these once- upheld appearances become too ugly to bear the sight of any longer. Recalled Dorian Gray as an analogue to how Bonello approaches the subject of beauty- Yves claims to strive for “the fight for elegance”, and yet the little manifestations of his own tenuous ontological security- the Buddha and his French bulldog Moujik, namely- are hidden away in ostensible safety until Yves’ worlds start to bleed into each other, and begin (like the portrait) to wither away. That these narrative derailments are barely seen to be part of Yves’ life- much of which is spent quite literally hiding in the shadows, dancing at parties where no one knows his name and being too drunk to process the blood dripping from his wrists- only strengthens the film’s qualities as a dizzying sensorial portrait of a man thrust into the position of representing national/cultural identity when his grasp on his own identity is already so unsteady.