If anything, L'Amour Fou is documentary proof that home furnishing sales are boring. Even if - especially if - they are auctions of an especially luxurious collection of art, furniture and decorative objects.
Though it's sold, ostensibly, as a documentary look at the private life of Yves Saint Laurent and his life partner Pierre Berge, L'Amour Fou is built, mainly, around Berge's decision to empty the contents of the three homes he shared with YSL, and the subsequent auction held by Christie's (which as many noted, netted Berge some $500 million, though the film never mentions it).
The film lightly covers biographical details of Saint Laurent and Berge (though mostly YSL) and charts their life together in Paris, Marrakech and Normandy... but L'Amour Fou is a film, as fashion films are, with lots of style and very little to say. Berge, who provides most of the narration, is at once frank, revealing, and vague. Though he's direct about the problems Saint Laurent had with drugs, alcohol and depression, there's also the protective instinct not to make Saint Laurent look bad as a result. The net effect is tame, toned down, and distancing.
Which is a shame, because the interiors that Saint Laurent created with Berge - a style, which, if it had a name, might be called seventies eclectic opulent - are by themselves stunning, and suggest a life of far more vitality and excitement. Both men had great taste and terrific eyes, and a real sense of the spaces they wanted to inhabit. Unlike many wealthy folks who use interior design to create a sense of taste or permanence, Berge and Saint Laurent simply bought what they liked and found space for it somewhere. The effect - with Picassos and Warhols and Goyas sharing space with Art Deco vases and Brancusi sculpture - is a constant barrage of beautiful icons, arranged for rooms where life is actually lived, and comfortably.
It's only as the rooms begin to be taken apart and the artwork divided into relevant groups and eras, that one can begin to make sense of the vastness of their holdings. But really, they weren't "holdings" or particularly "investments" - Berge talks, at length, about various pieces and their significance to the couple, and it's clear that the acquisitions were personal and meaningful. What's remarkable, really, is that Berge felt no need, after his partner's death, to hold onto the remnants and possessions of the life they lived together (and, at times, separately, when Berge could no longer handle YSL's drug problems). Berge gives the distinct sense of both gieving and knowing when it's time to let go and move on. It's not the things that matter... it's the memories he has to hold.
Along with Valentino and Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent represents a generational triumph of a certain sort of creative gay aesthetic. Each, now has been the subject of documentaries (in fact, more than one for each of them)... yet the sense of who they are, how they lived, what they accomplished, remains maddeningly elusive. From their genteel efforts to downplay their sexuality (Lagerfeld, oddly, has been the most frank) to their reluctance to reveal their creative processes, these top designers tend to like to let the work, the fashions they created, speak for themselves. Indeed, the most moving section of L'Amour Fou is right at its opening, as Saint Laurent, announcing his retirement, takes a moment to put into words his thinking about what fashion is, and how he approached the idea of making clothes for women (in essence, to make women comfortable and eager to take on the world). In those few words, he says more about fashion and designing and creativity than the rest of L'Amour Fou. Everything is not just beautiful, even if the film can't seem to figure that out.
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