Reviewed:
L’Amour Fou, directed by Pierre Thoretton
Bobby Fischer Against The World, directed by Liz Garbus
When renowned couturier Yves Saint Laurent died in 2008, his longtime lover and business partner Pierre Berg decided to rid himself of the accoutrements of their nearly 50-year relationship via one of the largest private auctions ever held. Over three days, well-heeled art lovers from around the world swarmed the Grand Palais in Paris in hopes of bagging one of the couple’s cherished Brancusi statues, a Matisse or a Mondrian, or even just a gloriously kitschy piece of vintage homoerotica. By the time the last lot sold, the collection had exceeded all expectations by netting a sensational $480-million.
In L’Amour fou, filmmaker Pierre Thoretton uses that auction not as a springboard to a traditional biography of Saint Laurent, but as a way of taking literal inventory of his life. Guided by Berg in the weeks leading up to the sale, we meander through the couple’s spectacularly art-engorged Left Bank apartment as everything in it is painstakingly itemized, appraised, boxed up, and shipped out. The rest of the film consists of archival footage of Saint Laurent, but only enough to provide the most basic biographical overview: at age 21, named chief designer of House of Dior; after being fired by Dior, starts eponymous couture house with Berg; becomes first couturier to launch prt–porter line; invents “safari chic” and other fashion crazes; becomes addicted to booze and drugs; battles depression and mental illness; withdraws into semi-solitude with Berg; finally retires from fashion biz in 2002 before succumbing to brain cancer.
Initially, it seems as if Thoretton is sifting through Saint Laurent’s stuff in search of deeper revelations about the man, but as the film goes on we’re made increasingly aware of how little his belongings tell us anything. In fact, the longer we look, the more he recedes from view. As a portrait of Saint Laurent, the film might be regarded as a failure. But as an essay on mortality, it’s affecting. There’s something deeply sobering about watching the articles of a person’s life – the things one surrounds oneself with to create meaning and a sense of identity – borne away. Whatever those objects meant to Saint Laurent, they’re moving on to mean new things to new people, and as each one goes, so too goes Saint Laurent. It’s as if they’d never had any connection to him at all.
Though the cool, collected Berg insists he is “not at all nostalgic” and that parting with Saint Laurent’s things is nothing compared to parting with Saint Laurent himself, you can see this isn’t entirely true. Late in the film, we see Berg sitting in a private room watching the auction on a closed-circuit television monitor, and he becomes intensely focussed on the sale of one particular item. We don’t know what the item means to him, or what it meant to Saint Laurent, but when it sells, a world of private emotion passes silently across his face. He smiles softly, then, for reasons known only to himself, slowly begins to applaud.
Bobby Fischer Against the World is another portrait of a solitary celebrity, in this case the world chess champion and noted eccentric who went into self-imposed seclusion at the height of his success in the late 1970s. Anyone who knows even a little about chess is likely to be familiar with the events outlined in the first portion of the film: Fischer’s rise from obscurity in Brooklyn, his underdog status as one of the only Americans to seriously challenge the chess-obsessed Russians, his near-breakdown and then stunning success in his fabled match with Soviet champ Boris Spassky. Director Liz Garbus does a solid job of recounting all this. I could have done without the obvious, overused pop music cues, and it would’ve been nice if more of the chess moves had been broken down into their component parts so we could understand what was happening on the board, but this is nitpicking. The film works as a swift-moving primer on Fischer, and even better, it delivers the much less well known story of what happened to him later in life. Without giving too much away, he didn’t exactly go out in a blaze of glory, and it makes you wonder about the whole earthly concept of greatness – what it is, and whether it’s even something to be admired. In Fischer’s case, greatness was inseparable from monomania, and you leave the film feeling more pity for him than awe.
