Towards the tip of “Celebration,” a documentary capturing Yves Saint Laurent’s last years as a working designer, we watch him arrive in New York along with his enterprise associate and onetime lover, Pierre Bergé, for the 1999 C.F.D.A. Style Awards. Bergé—nonetheless blustery and energetic at sixty-eight—flanks Saint Laurent protectively as the 2 depart their lodge for the ceremony, the place the designer is ready to obtain a lifetime-achievement award. Saint Laurent was solely sixty-two on the time, however he appears a lot older: frail and unsure in his tuxedo, he totters down a hallway, anxiously licking his lips and smoothing again his too-thick cap of shoe-polish-brown hair. “It’ll be higher in three hours,” Bergé tells him, as if reassuring a toddler.
Onstage, Saint Laurent provides a brief thank-you speech in halting English. Designers like himself, he says, should behave like artists, “sacrificing every thing, typically even our lives, to commit ourselves solely to our work.” The viewers provides him a standing ovation, and Bergé seems cautiously relieved. However as Saint Laurent begins to make his unsteady method out of the banquet corridor, Bergé rushes to his facet, to assist him. “He’ll fall,” he frets.
Yves Saint Laurent, 1966.{Photograph} by Harry Meerson / © Harry Meerson / Courtesy ICP
“Celebration,” which was directed by the French filmmaker Olivier Meyrou, does a eager, refined job of exploring the fissures between picture and actuality—between how issues seem and the way they, the truth is, are. Saint Laurent, who died in 2008, was maybe one of many twentieth century’s biggest designers. The creator of vivid, indelible fantasies for ladies to strive on and to embody was additionally a fragile and anguished man, troubled all through his life by alcohol, drug dependency, and bouts of debilitating despair. The documentary pays tribute to the designer’s genius: the seductive, unfussy aptitude of his designs is clear, for example, in footage from the monumental 1998 trend present that Yves Saint Laurent staged on the Stade de France, in an effort to commemorate the FIFA World Cup. However the movie’s title is finally ironic. We watch as Saint Laurent is hustled, with some effort, from one activity to the subsequent by members of his workforce, who try, not all the time efficiently, to place a courageous face on issues. He’s nonetheless sketching his designs, nonetheless providing faint ideas on the creations that the petites mains—the home’s grasp seamstresses and artisans—will execute, however he appears nearly completely misplaced in his personal world. Quite than a celebration, the movie performs extra like a funeral procession, or maybe a bedside vigil for a person who has, certainly, seemingly sacrificed his life in pursuit of his artwork. It’s a harrowing portrayal, and it’s not completely shocking that after a single screening of the movie, in 2007, Bergé sued over an unauthorized picture, blocking the film’s launch for greater than a decade.
