L’Amour Fou

Not to be confused with Jacques Rivette’s 1969 new wave megalith of the same name, this L’Amour Fou is the latest in a pearl-string of fawning docs on famous fashion industrialists (apparently, there’s a lot of vanity and venture capital floating around). Director Pierre Thoretton gathers scrapbook memories of the late designer Yves Saint Laurent, mostly from his longtime partner Pierre Bergé, and forgoes exhaustive biography for something moodier and more personal. Wandering the globe and groping for a structure, Thoretton fixates on the auctioning off of Bergé and Saint Laurent’s shared art collection, which only sums up their relationship as a fussy display of material wealth. YSL is shown rallying votes for Mitterrand, lest we get the wrong idea, but it’s too late. Theirs doesn’t seem like a particularly mad love, but it is potentially maddening: What exactly was the poor little rich boy so depressed about? Deadlines, really? Or maybe the terrible burden of fame? The existential conundrum of impulse-buying a house in Marrakesh? The steady support from a committed, tolerant partner? Ah, je ne sais quoi!