L'Amour Fou (Friday, May 20, 2011) (33)

L'Amour Fou, or "crazy love", is a documentary ostensibly about the relationship and partnership between Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge. It shows how they met in the late 1950s, fell in love and then worked together for the next 40 years. The film was shot after YSL died in 2008 and just as Berge is about to have all of their belongings crated up and sent to auction in 2009.

The problem with the film is that it's a bunch of information about Yves Saint Laurent, Berge, their art collection, their auction and their relationship, but there is no sensible structure, so we don't know what to make of what we see. On the surface this seems like it could be a bio-doc, or a double bio-doc (a bi-bio-doc?) about who YSL and Berge were and how they created the House of Yves Saint Laurent, what it did and what its legacy is. We actually get only a smattering of history, finding out that they met through YSL's mentor, Christian Dior (although it's not clear how Berge knew him), and set up a new couture house later.

Major facts about YSL, like how he popularized (or invented?) pret-a-porter lines and pant-suits, are alluded to in passing, but never really underlined. There are a few interviews with a few women who worked with them, but they're never identified and their recollections are trivial.

Bizarrely we see a lot of footage of art handlers packing up works of art and sending them to New York, then London and then to Paris for the auction of their stuff. There seems to be a fake poignant moment when Berge is watching their stuff be sold for gigantic prices (a total of $484 million ...in the midst of the worst economy in recent memory) and his face is somewhere between sad because he's giving up his stuff and happy because he's making so much money with it. This doesn't really lead to anything and we don't really know enough about his relationship with the art to know how he feels.

I can't say this movie teaches you much about YSL, Berge or the auction of their stuff. It's a prefect example of how documentaries need a script or an outline in order to make sense. This doesn't seem to have either and as a result we bounce from one house to another (it seems that they had three homes together, in Paris, Marrakesh and Normandy), from one time period to another and from one anecdote about collecting art to another. We never learn what motivated YSL in his designs, what motivated Berge to be a fastidious manager, how they worked together while loving one another, why they collected the art they collected and how they came to purchase it all. We sometimes get the suggestion of answers to a lot of these things, but nothing direct or specific.

Stars: 1 of 4