“When Yves Saint Laurent looked at his paintings, he saw paintings. When Pierre Bergé looked at the paintings, he saw Yves Saint Laurent,” opined the director of “L’Amour Fou,” Pierre Thoretton. After Saint Laurent’s death, “it was too unbearable to keep the collection around him.”
And so, from Bergé’s pain, a documentary was born, one that isn’t so much about artwork or fashion, but about relationships and love. Complicated, brilliant, painful, sometimes ruinous love, a byproduct of which — over $480 million in artwork — was auctioned off by Christie’s after the 2008 death of the renowned French couturier Saint Laurent, who amassed the collection with Bergé, his romantic partner of over 50 years.
The film opens with the elderly Bergé — remembered by others and shown throughout the documentary as the roll-up-his-sleeves, no-nonsense taskmaster and business visionary who provided capital (both mental and financial) to YSL’s fashion house — sitting in the couple’s impressive and, well, almost claustrophobic Paris duplex. A space that might have been expansive in the hands of other residents is filled to the ceiling with furniture, sculptures and paintings from all eras and all areas of the world — some by masters like Matisse and Picasso, and others equally rare, like bronze animal heads reportedly plundered from China in the Second Opium War of 1860.
Amidst it all, not long after burying Saint Laurent, Bergé calmly explains his plan to have it packaged up and sold off. “I’m not nostalgic,” he claims. And because he’s French and appears quite lucid, and not a trace of emotion betrays itself on his face, you think, “OK. Wow. He means business.” If you’re not yet versed in the story that will unfold in tandem with images of French guys crating up artwork, you wonder, perhaps, how this man was loveable to anyone at all.
“He is really nostalgic,” Thoretton later countered, in an interview conducted with the help of a translator. “There’s a large margin between what somebody says and what somebody is.” Opening the film this way was no accident. Bergé “talks about not being attached to things,” Thoretton said, and this gave the director the space to build the story of the romance, showing that Bergé, in the wake of YSL’s death, was and probably still is “struggling against something.”
“I don’t think he was in denial,” Thoretton continued. “I think he is building something to protect himself against sadness. I think he really does believe what he says [in the film].”
“L’ Amour Fou” is Thoretton’s first documentary, and what resonates isn’t Bergé’s initial coldness so much as his unflinching devotion to a man who, he recently told the New York Times, was manically depressed. The brilliant career, the artwork, and the homes in Paris, Marrakech and, finally, Deauville (plans to quietly entertain friends there never really took off, Bergé reveals matter-of-factly) were no match for Saint Laurent’s depression, which led him, for a period, to drug and alcohol abuse.
Though it all, Bergé never left. Well, not for long, anyway. What some TV shrinks might deem codependence built a lasting empire that impacted fashion as much as the work of any other designer ever has. “They had common interests and common passions,” Thoretton said. “One always caught the other, so to speak, when he fell. YSL was in love with haute couture, and Pierre Bergé was in love with YSL being in love with haute couture. So, in a sense, their passion carried them through.”
What viewers take away isn’t so much about YSL’s Mondrian-inspired dresses, or his introduction of pantsuits for women, or the high-stakes auctions for his art, or even where the money went (AIDS charities and a foundation for keeping the legacy of YSL alive), but the devotion and indulgence of one man slowly coming to terms — his own, to be sure — with a lover’s death.