Bonello’s latest feature focuses on a dark, hedonistic, wildly creative decade (from 1967 to ’77) in Yves Saint Laurent’s life and career. Over the course of the film, the couturier—convincingly embodied first by Gaspard Ulliel, and later by Visconti stalwart Helmut Berger—becomes a myth, a brand, and an avatar of his era, moving through a string of hothouse ateliers and nightclubs whose centers of gravity all seem to realign around him. Bonello’s primary interest here, however, is cinema’s potential to capture and warp the passage of time. Saint Laurent is a kaleidoscopic torrent of lavish excess, retrospectively pieced together with a Proustian form of fast-and-loose association—and a delirious twist on the modern biopic’s rules and limitations. An NYFF52 selection. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Bertrand Bonello and Gaspard Ulliel talk Saint Laurent on our podcast The Close-Up. Subscribe today!

New York Film Festival 2014
Cannes Film Festival 2014

“Critics' Pick! [G]iddy, intoxicating, decidedly decadent… a perfect match of filmmaker and subject.” —A.O. Scott, New York Times

“Saint Laurent is a memory movie with a splendidly idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and pace.” —Nathan Lee, Film Comment