Cinephile-Francophile

Archive for October, 2010

Pierre Thoretton’s “L’Amour Fou” has little folly. It is a measured, slow paced, beautifully scored and surprisingly subdued documentary on the passion between the somewhat severe (though he wasn’t always so…) entrepreneur Pierre Bergé and the fashion design prodigy Yves-Saint-Laurent who inherited the Dior empire at the age of twenty-one only to launch his own but a few years later. The film chronicles the highs and lows of their fifty years together not so much through the prism of fashion as through that of a kind of personal art history. A former artist himself, and ex-son-in-law of YSL’s “favorite” Catherine Deneuve, the director originally scripted the documentary around the majesty of the couple’s various homes in Paris, Normandy and Marrakesh and especially around the works of art assembled throughout their life together which were then famously (or infamously to some) disassembled by Bergé after his partner’s passing. Indeed, the Christy auction frames their narrative, or rather Bergé’s narrative as he is the central figure of this documentary seemingly centered on YSL. Bergé is hardly the gregarious type. Pragmatic and unspiritual (if not to say uninspired), his aloof recollection of his love, lover and love of art is a strange contrast to the director’s chosen title for the film and to the reality of his life-long love affair. The result is a sobering and wounded entry into a world otherwise so glitzy, flamboyant and digressive. And as such his story, their story, is truly moving. Bergé anchors their life and love with calculated words, he explains YSL’s fragile mental state with clinical understanding and describes their obvious passion with near deadpan sarcasm (the bit about moving out and away… just around the corner, betrays the man’s odd brew of pragmatism and passion). While the dispersal of such an extraordinary collection, testimony to the life shared by these two unlikely kindred souls, into private homes may embitter (one would have hoped at least a generous gift to the nation – Lord knows Bergé could afford it, but that simply is not who the man is), still, their love comes across as heartbreakingly real, one willfully built to last, through effort and compromise, in a world of artifice.

And rest assured, amidst the gravity, there is quite enough haute couture brilliance to dazzle the fashionistas…

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