The Flawless Surface of Yves Saint Laurent

Toward the end of “Celebration,” a documentary capturing Yves Saint Laurent’s final years as a working designer, we watch him arrive in New York with his business partner and onetime lover, Pierre Bergé, for the 1999 C.F.D.A. Fashion Awards. Bergé—still blustery and energetic at sixty-eight—flanks Saint Laurent protectively as the two leave their hotel for the ceremony, where the designer is set to receive a lifetime-achievement award. Saint Laurent was only sixty-two at the time, but he looks much older: frail and uncertain in his tuxedo, he totters down a hallway, anxiously licking his lips and smoothing back his too-thick cap of shoe-polish-brown hair. “It’ll be better in three hours,” Bergé tells him, as if reassuring a child.

Onstage, Saint Laurent gives a short thank-you speech in halting English. Designers like himself, he says, must behave like artists, “sacrificing everything, sometimes even our lives, to devote ourselves only to our work.” The audience gives him a standing ovation, and Bergé appears cautiously relieved. But as Saint Laurent begins to make his unsteady way out of the banquet hall, Bergé rushes to his side, to help him. “He’ll fall,” he frets.

“Celebration,” which was directed by the French filmmaker Olivier Meyrou, does a keen, subtle job of exploring the fissures between image and reality—between how things appear and how they, in fact, are. Saint Laurent, who died in 2008, was perhaps one of the twentieth century’s greatest designers. The creator of vivid, indelible fantasies for women to try on and to embody was also a fragile and anguished man, troubled throughout his life by alcohol, drug dependency, and bouts of debilitating depression. The documentary pays tribute to the designer’s genius: the seductive, unfussy flair of his designs is evident, for instance, in footage from the monumental 1998 fashion show that Yves Saint Laurent staged at the Stade de France, in order to commemorate the FIFA World Cup. But the film’s title is ultimately ironic. We watch as Saint Laurent is hustled, with some effort, from one task to the next by members of his team, who attempt, not always successfully, to put a brave face on things. He is still sketching his designs, still offering faint thoughts on the creations that the petites mains—the house’s master seamstresses and artisans—will execute, but he seems almost entirely lost in his own world. Rather than a celebration, the film plays more like a funeral procession, or perhaps a bedside vigil for a man who has, indeed, seemingly sacrificed his life in pursuit of his art. It’s a harrowing portrayal, and it’s not entirely surprising that after a single screening of the film, in 2007, Bergé sued over an unauthorized image, blocking the movie’s release for more than a decade.