Araz Eleyasian | The Paper Rose / 2018

tutoring the teacher

by Douglas Messerli

 

Talin Agon and Araz Eleyasian (screenplay), Araz Eleyasian (director) The Paper Rose / 2018 [9 minutes]

 

A very frustrated English teacher, Toni (Bronte Pearce) is nervous about her day in school. She’s teaching Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, a book she clearly loves. But when we see the antics of her students, each spending the classroom time sending text messages to the others when they’re not taunting the quiet Johnny (Damian Hempstead), we comprehend her trepidation. Her lesbian lover, Maggie, has given her a red paper rose, which remains as a book marker in her book to help remind her that she’s loved at home.

    When a bullying student throws Johnny’s book the floor as he leaves the classroom, the teacher finally has had enough, taking away the student’s cellphone and telling him he can pick it up at the end of the day. But he even challenges her, coming at her and pulling her copy of Great Expectations from her arms and tossing the paper rose to the floor, and stopping on the paper flower as he storms out of the room.

      As Johnny bends down to pick up the objects, the occasion of the rose, moments of joy, and more importantly, moments of extreme tension between the couple quickly reel through the teacher’s mind. The rose has clearly come to represent a great many events in her life. As Johnny hands back the book and rose, he suggests that he might be able to make another one, but Toni observes that it was a gift, and irreplaceable for that very reason.

      Still, he argues that she might be able to make another one that can’t be destroyed unless she takes into rooms where angry 14-year-old boys can stomp on them.

      A short while later, Toni passes by the same boy with another like him, asking “where’s the fruit,” presumably referring to Johnny, the other replying, “Probably at home in bed crying.” The teacher stops for a moment to glare at them before moving on.

 

      She pulls opens a locker door—presumably inspecting it as she may have forced to in the past—to witness a calendar marked up with the word “fag,” a glob of what looks like cum, and a picture of a naked man marked up with the words, “Lick if off Johnny.” In a split second she recalls her own youth when someone threw a soccer ball at her head, screaming out “Hey dyke.”

 

      As she leaves the building, she discovers Johnny sitting reading the Dickens book, she responding, “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

      “They screwed up my locker again, didn’t they?” he half laughs. “I don’t care if they think I’m gay.”

     She assures him that they won’t get away with it. But he is more interested in the book she has assigned, telling her how “awesome” he finds the novel. She’s clearly pleased that at least one student is enjoying the book. But she quickly returns to what she perceives as his dilemma. “You have it tough, don’t you?”

      But his response is again amazingly aloof: “Shit happens. I like to come here with Pip and….”

      She finishes his sentence, “…disappear.”

      “No, just read.”

     Toni argues that she always identified more with Stella, Johnny arguing “But she’s so damaged. You’re not like that.”

       She confides, in a round-about way, that the reason she stays late at school is because she doesn’t want to go home. “Teaching is one of the only things I’m good at.”

       “Don’t get lost in stories, Johnny,” she advises her new confidant.

       Johnny’s answer is surprisingly mature. “But I’m not lost. I know who I am.”

      What we observe here for one of the first occasions in queer cinema is a young man, perhaps gay and certainly bullied, revealing a greater sense of self possession, knowledge, and maturity than both the kids around him and the troubled adult teacher. He even dares to go further, asking Toni if she knows who she is. A strange half-smile registers on her face as she hands him back his book and wishes him happy Valentine’s Day.

       In it, is a white paper rose. Johnny smiles with joy.

       We see Toni knocking at her lover’s door, having apparently previously left or broken up with her. The two greet one another with reluctant smiles, which we know will certainly shift to fuller expressions of love given that behind Toni’s back she holds a whole bouquet of paper roses.

     Australian director Araz Eleyasian has provided us with a film that quickly pulls its LGBTQ characters out of their usual hurt and passive positions, giving them a self-awareness that makes it clear they are not simply survivors but are whole beings who will prevail.

      I have to admit that basically through the days I my teaching experiences I was blessed with multiple good students, and these, being college kids, did not behave like high school thugs. But there was always one special student to change your day. 

 

Los Angeles, October 11, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Michael Pearce | Rite / 2010

the man without a clue

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Pearce (screenwriter and director) Rite / 2010 [14 minutes]

 

Mike (Martin Herdman) picks up his estranged son, Gary (Bradley Hall) whom he has not seen in a long while, to take him out for the for his 17th birthday. Even as he arrives and leaves the car, he realizes that he has locked his keys without the car. Picking up a brick he smashes the car window, finally walking up to pick up his boy in one of the near brick row houses of so many British suburban areas.

     As he begins driving down the freeway, Gary asks, as any child might, where they are going. His father suggests he open the compartment, where he finds nothing. A thorough search of the of the cars contents provides nothing. He has evidently lost the tickets he’s purchased for an important soccer game.

     Even worse, Mike decides to now stop along the way at a local roadside pub, sneaking in to get a few pints. The manager finally invites the boy himself to leave the car and join his father. His father is also attempting, unsuccessfully, to get more tickets.

     Meanwhile Gary attempts to bring over for glasses, but drops them before they can even reach the table, Mike reassuring him, as others around them makes gestures about the boys lips piercing.

It is a loud, noisy, and hostile atmosphere.

     The bargoers are now gathering abound the tele for the soccer game to begin. Although the father has brought his son a new drink, the boy admits he does not imbibe, the father wondering what it is he does in his life. The boy suggests exhibitions, gigs…his father summarizing his activities as culture. Spotting a fairly good looking slightly older girl, his father says, “I bet you wouldn’t say know to that kind of culture.”

      Gary takes a quick look, and replies simply: “Not my type.”

      His type, he explains, is “black,” but says nothing about their sex.

      Finally, they ready to move on without obtaining any tickets to the next match.

    But before they leave, he is offended by what he perceives to be a gay man in the bathroom and whether actually or in fantasy, knows his head up again the wall, and leaves him for dead.

     They move forward to god knows where, by this time the son having totally missed out in any possible joys which might have even been imagined, the father having no longer any comprehension of who is son is.

     Finally, at the stadium, he desperately scrambles to see if he can obtain tickets, trying to find someone ready to sell, again without success. He finally attempts to bull his way through a guard into the stadium, as the guard, terrified for his life, closes the door, locking himself in. If nothing else, Mike has certainly made a great case for why he wife has long-ago divorced him. This is a violent man of narrow values and opinions, a drunkard, and a bully. Gary finally walks away, unable to observe his father’s actions anymore.

      Gary decides to finally explain to him that “he doesn’t give a shit.” He hates football. And for a moment Mike is again about to act with violence, while Gary responds “Well, you gonna hit me Dad?” If ever things are broken down, this film reveals the condition of so many father/son relationships.

       Mike backs off, turns away, and walks off knowing that he and his son do not share the same world. It is a sad moment of self-revelation, particularly for a drunken bully, whose life, we perceive, is no longer ever truly joyful.

       His father drives him back home, and suggests he will see him in a couple of weeks. “Maybe we can do something else,” Gary reacting, “Like what?”

      When his son walks off, Mike gets out of the car, only to observe Gary, now in a nearby park with a young black boy of his age, his had laying on his shoulder. We now know the sex he prefers as well.

     Mike, now clearly in crisis, pauses for a few moments, his had across his brow is recognition perhaps of how much he has misunderstood his son.

      Beyond all belief, by this time, he walks up to the park where he son sits, calling out his name. The boys freeze, surely afraid of the consequences.

      Instead, Mike simply introduces himself to Tristan (Aaron Gordon) as Gary’s day, Tristan reaching out to shake his hand to say “nice to meet you.” “I’ve just come to say, maybe next time we can go to the coast or something.”

      “Sure.”

      “And if Tristan wants to come….”

      Mike walks off, if not a new man, certainly a chastised one for his thoughtless presumptions.

As he drives off, he notices his son has left the device upon which he was listening to his music. Mike puts on the headphones, and drives off.

 

Los Angeles, September 30, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

Dominique Choisy | Ma vie avec James Dean (My Life with James Dean) / 2017

several individuals desperately seeking new lives

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dominique Choisy (screenwriter and director) Ma vie avec James Dean (My Life with James Dean) / 2017

 

One of my very favorites of the teen years of the century, and a great many other critics, was Dominique’s Choisy’s My Life with James Dean, a rather indefinable film regarding genre and plot that rambled its way quite lazily through a great many lives who accidently collide when the young film director Géraud Champreux (the somewhat inscrutable and always slightly off quilter Johnny Rasse), who has made a strange gay art film titled My Life with James Dean, although having nothing at all to do with James Dean or anybody else’s experience with him. Dean stands, presumably for a kind of bisexual force which perhaps permeates the film, although thankfully we never see the full film nor its full contents revealed. It is simply an art-house film that seems attract the interest of the woman, Sylvia van den Rood (Nathalie Richard), who has invited Géraud to come from Paris to a small town in Normandy and surrounding villages which like-minded independent film owners nearby show to nearly empty theaters; it is well known that in Normandy the audiences are only interested, as the film usher declares, in American action films and comedies.

     Despite his invitation to this village, which before he even gets there by bus a young boy steals his cellphone while he is sleeping, is put up in someone unpleasant accommodations: no phones in the room, no bar, no work-out space, etc. The hotel desk clerk Gladys (Juliette Damiens) is clearly interested in Géraud—she is interested in any man who might take her out of her existence as hotel receptionist and into her in his arms into paradise—even though she quickly perceives her new visitor is gay.

      Géraud himself is distressed, having evidently broken up with his lover, the actor who plays the central character in his film, who when he finally does visit his director is only too ready to return to the arms of the woman he his has left him for, perhaps his wife.

     The theater which is to show the film does not even know of the late-night showing, and the organizer/owner of the theater, Sylvia, does not even show up for the performance. Only one mysterious old lady shows up for the showing, and the lovely and lively young projectionist, the central figure of the film, Balthazar (Mickaël Pelissier), who like the famous wise men who visited Christ brings a lovely perfume of hope into Géraud’s life. He, incidentally, is also the ticket taker, another person terribly unhappy with his role in the small town of Le Tréport. He presents himself as 19, although we later discover he is only 16, which although the legal age of consent in France is 15, still terrifies, evidently, most US reviewers and readers (even though in many states throughout the US, the age is also 16), particularly since the absolutely insistent boy immediately falls in love with the movie and its creator.

      Seeing the situation, Géraud, having no intention of watching his own movie yet again in an empty theater, retires to a local bar and proceeds to get what can only be describes as “stinking drunk.” Young Balthazar retrieves him, almost carries him back to the hotel, and with Gladys’ help puts him properly to bed, although she surely might have liked to help undress him.

      The next day Sylvia shows up, with great apologies, explaining she has been also going through martial difficulties, not bothering to explain what those may be; she has simply forgotten about the premiere of his film. Her problems continue throughout the film, and in one of the earliest of what critics have described as “silly but loveable” scenes, Géraud attempts to follow her like a spy out of silent films, or more pointedly, the way Audrey Hepburn attempts to follow Cary Grant in their famous “love” film Charade of 1963.

      However, in this case, it is not only Géraud following after Sylvia, but Balthazar after him, and Gladys trailing both. This kind of multiple stalking happens at least a couple of times in this work, the critic Rich Cline, withing in Shadows on the Wall, catching the lunacy of their actions:

 

“The performances are all wonderfully sweet and understated, yet with an edge of Almodovarian silliness. Instead we have breezy coastals knocking around within their own world and reaching for something greater, spurred on by the inspiration of film. Richard’s Catherine, a sun-bleached lover of the cerebral world of movies, seems like a fish out of water unless comfortably seated in the theater. Rasse’s Géraud is a troubled, comically confused romantic who longs for a deeper meaning when sometimes there is nothing left to discern.”

 

      Yet, in this foray into the invasion of other’s lives we may quickly be led to believe that Sylvia’s male lover is having an affair with another woman, whom she calls to her face a whore. But soon after we discover, that, in fact, the woman is Sylvia’s lover who has run away with a man. This shifts everything, as we realize that in this film no one who we have so far encountered in this provincial village lives or wants a normative heterosexual life, expect perhaps for Gladys, who by film’s end, does find, somehow as one of the trail of confused people, a male lover.

     To appease Géraud, Balthazar lies, saying after he left, several others showed up, telling the manager that he took to the money home and will bring it in the next day.

      Sylvia does manage to chauffeur her guest to his showing at a colleague’s theater in a nearby Normandy village the next day. And here, because of an agreement with a nurse in a nearby old age home, he busses in its habitants to the movies on a regular basis. Attendance is just fine, but whether or not any of the audience knows what is happening in this movie is doubtful.

     Balathazar reveals his love for Géraud and attempts to make him understand he is what the troubled director is missing in his life. But the midst of his own attempts at courting, Géraud’s former Paris lover shows up. And it seems for a few moments like there might be a possible rapprochement, until his girlfriend/wife shows up to scurry him back to Paris.

      Sylvia and her lesbian lover also make up temporarily, but it is a short return to what was previously normalcy, and she quickly leaves once again, Sylvia finally having to face the fact.

      Balthazar, meanwhile, shows up in Géraud’s room and literally seduces him, which at least allows him one night of remarkable sex. But when, soon after, the director discovers his real age is not 19 but 16, he again rebuffs him.

      But by this time, the boy has insisted his own father watch Géraud’s My Life with James Dean and comes out to his mother, both parents, being unlike shocked and controlling US parents, realizing that perhaps it is time for their precocious son move on to Paris, and what better hands to put him in but a 30-some year old gay man, who perhaps will love and protect him for a while before Balthazar can actually discover the city by himself, find a job, and a lover more age appropriate. They bless him as he joins the now somewhat complacent Géraud, whose next film is based on one of Gladys’ favorite genres, the Bombay musical.

      Nothing really makes logical sense in this film, but that is it’s argument, I believe.

      Norman Gibney in Film Threat effectively describes the way in which this film functions:

 

“This is the leisurely pace that My Life with James Dean weaves and unfolds its mysteries. This beguiling love letter to the power of cinema cares not that you don’t have all the answers. You will get them, in time. But then again, it isn’t so much about an outcome as it is the journey each of these people are on. Sylvia [Gibney mistakenly calls her Catherine] (Nathalie Richard), the scattered film programmer that invited Géraud to her tiny berg, is apoplectic as her partner Louise (Marie Vernalde) has left her, forgetting to make the screening she booked. Gladys (Juliette Damiens), manager of the front desk at the hotel seems to have a passing interest in Géraud, though it is clear Géraud is gay. Young Balthazar seems so fixated on the film Géraud brings to town that he invites his father Tony (Bertrand Belin) to watch it when it screens a second time.

     While there is enough happening to keep the viewer passively entertained, it is the unsaid that becomes the most interesting. Choisy refrains from dropping the usual hints that orient an audience, instead allowing scenes to unfold, letting us absorb contextual elements that give us a sense of what is really going on. It is this method that soon provokes us to slow down, look closer, and become accustomed to picking up nuance.”

 

Los Angeles, September 29, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

 

Josh Appignanesi | Rufus Stone / 2012

two old men in a final hug knowing they cannot redeem the past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Josh Appignanesi and Kip Jones (screenplay), Josh Appignanesi (director) Rufus Stone / 2012 [31 minutes]

 

This is a painful reminder of gay life in small provincial villages, this based on social research into the older gay experience in rural south England and Wales by the Bournemouth University School of Health and Social Care.

    The first part of this film is a view back into the youths of the major three characters Rufus Stone (played in the younger version by Harry Kershaw), his male friend Flip (played early on by Tom Kane) and his supposed girlfriend Abigail (Martha Myers Lowe). All three spend a day in the wood, with the boys particularly getting to know one another better, but as they relationship develops, Abigail keeps popping up to drag Rufus away from Flip.

     At one point she actually seems to succeed, pulling him off to share a beautiful view from a hilltop, but suddenly Flip reappears, ramming his body into Rufus’ and dragging him to the ground, where the two pleasantly wrestle together. He pulls Rufus off to the old swimming hole, stripping naked and diving in, encouraging Rufus to do the same thing. The two pleasantly swim around one another and finally meet up for one looks like their first kiss. But once again, up pops Abigail, demanding Rufus’ full attention. When this time he doesn’t respond, she turns to another of the citizens enjoying their local woods, obviously spreading the rumor that the boys are homosexually involved, and that person, in turn, whispers in the ear of the next much like the old telephone game.

     Before the end of the day, Flip’s mother (Phillipa Stanton) is seen dragging her son behind her as, with knife in hand, she arrives at the Stone’s house yelling for him to stay away from her son.

Soon after, we see Rufus, with his head on a table, as he father (Jon Nicholas) beats him, his mother (Freyja Faraday) cowering in the background.

     Soon after, back pack on his shoulders, we watch Rufus hitchhike to London.

     Now, years later, Rufus (now played by William Gaunt) is brought back to the village in order to sell the home after both his parents’ death.

     He briefly wanders through his old home, clearly representing some fond memories, but also quite painful ones. He discovers his old camera, the one he held with him the day of his joyful discovery of love, but as he walks across the room he falls flat to the floor. Had I done so, an ambulance would have had to been called to help get me up. But Rufus can still crawl to his knees, awakening when the doorbell rights, looking out the windows to see the horrible memories of the past with neighbors pointing their fingers and his behavior.

    Hardly is he able to call a real estate agent to come round and check out the house which he immediately wants to sell that he is visited by the now someone heavy hipped neighbor come to check out the new man who has arrived next door, a glass of wine in hand suggesting that she is now an alcoholic who drinks the day-long. He wouldn’t have perhaps ever know this woman who suggests that it “just happens that I’ve opened a nice bottle of white [wine],” before she announces her name, Abagail (Lin Blakley), the same small-minded girl who destroyed his existence in his youth. On the search for any man, she does not recognize her new prey.

     When he denies her offer for a drink, she insists since he his christening his new home and she is his closest neighbor, she will not take no for an answer: “You’re a man after my heart.” But obviously he is a man he detests her for good reason.

     “I suppose you’re the married type,” she proceeds in her selfish interrogation, and she almost gurgles with joy as he responds with a simple “No.”

      “No children?” he asks. She declares some day her prince will come, he recognizing her as “Abagail White still looking. Well, you’ve got stamina, I’ll give you that.”

     And like a bolt of lightning, she recognizes him for the first time as Rufus. Startled as he walks off, she shouts out “I’m sure Flip would love to see you. He still lives down the road.”

      It is nearly all to much for Rufus who still carries with him memories of the boy he loved so long ago. And now those memories get interleaved with Rufus’ own adult return to the woods, his loss of a life that might have been loving and fulfilling, although having lived on in Paris all of these years with a successful career, he now realizes it could never have existed had he stayed. He visits the same pond with some nostalgia but clearly with a kind of bitterness, a profound sadness, if nothing else similar to Bergman’s Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries.

      And there, suddenly out of the blue, he encounters Flip, who suggests when he was a lad you used to bathe here.

       His final recognition of Rufus is expressed with “My God.” They briefly manage an uncomfortable hug, and walk back together. Rufus discovers that he is still “the confirmed bachelor type,” but even worse still looking after his mother, the terrible woman with a knife in his childhood scenes. Rufus explains he’s putting his parent’s place up to sale, and finally allows he might have time for a quick tea before he drives back to London in his lovely yellow convertible.

      And Flip is even slightly embarrassed for the condition of his own quarters. His “old mum” is still the horrific spectre she was long ago, a mean looking woman of the provinces, who his young dream boy has been caring for all these years. And suddenly observing the stare of the old woman, Rufus begs his forgiveness for not having realized how much time has slipped away, suggesting he cannot stay.

      Flip chases after, not wondering why he hates his mother for what she did, but admitting that “she’s all I’ve ever had.” “You have to forgive,” he insists.

     Rufus’ response is cruel: “Do you, I never did.” Flip tries to explain that he stayed and this is his life, despite hearing of Rufus’ great successes in London. He wonders if Rufus had ever wondered kind of life he left for him, sneaking off to town once a while for a buggering with no joys, no pleasures. “Go back to London with your fancy friends, you selfish bugger,” he hisses as he breaks down in tears. “I’ve been so fucking lonely, and there’s not a soul in the world who knows it.”

     The pain of this scene, the man left behind in such messes, is almost unbearable to watch. There is no answer for those too fearful to make the same kind of choice Rufus did. Rufus hugs him, but almost immediately several women exit and the tea shoppe nearby, one of them shouting out, “I know you, you’re that bugger Rufus Stone.” Flip has no choice but to escape, still living in such an intolerant community. Rufus gets into his lovely yellow car to make another escape, but this time, quite inexplicably, it won’t start up. And he is forced to perceive that he may have to remain in this homophobic and intolerant world, haunting him with memories, yet another night.

      The dreadful Abagail arrives to tell him the news, Flip has just hung himself, he monstrous mother only able to mouth a few pitiable “Oh, Oh, Ohs,” as Abagail calls the police.

      In dreadful anger and vengeance, Rufus drags out the family’s old grandfather clock and numerous other antiquaries they have treasured, hacking them to pieces on the front lawn to their house and burning them in a bonfire to rid himself of the past and this world. As the terrible neighbors stand about horrified, he drags yet more furniture, one by one, adding it to the huge bonfire, the stupid Abagail attempting, yet again, to stop him. The symbolic gesture is clear, this world needs to be cleaned out from top to bottom, despite the neighbor’s desperate attempt to keep the status quo. As they attempt to stop him, he pushes them away and drags out even more mementos of the post and adds them to the fire, representative also of his own furious anger with the world in which he’s grown up, without now a trace of possible redemption.

     But in the midst of fury and anger, all suddenly witness the same vision, the ghost of the young Flip appearing to bless the world that is so torn apart that there is no way of restoring it’s thread of history. Alas, I don’t believe in ghosts.

     This, Vito Russo, is why gay men still unnecessarily destroy themselves. Abandonment in small provincial towns is a sure death no matter how it is represented on the screen. Even today, some LGBTQ+ individuals are left behind by their societies in undeterminable loneliness and hatred.

 

Los Angeles, September 29, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

     

Jalil Lespert | Yves Saint Laurent / 2014

the seminarian and the madman

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Fieschi, Jalil Lespert, Jérémie Guez, and Marie-Pierre Huster (screenplay, based on Laurence Benaïm’s Yves Saint Laurent), Jalil Lespert (director) Yves Saint Laurent / 2014

 

Jalil Lespert’s 2014 film on the life of French clothes designer Yves Saint Laurent is, at least according to the standard biographies of the subject, fairly accurate, although it is clear that much of it is from the viewpoint of Saint Laurent’s manager/lover Pierre Bergé.

     Eventually I’d like to see a film made about Bergé himself, who, on his first day in Paris served as a human buffer as the great poet and film-scripter, Jacques Prévert who fell at his feet him from a window as Bergé moved out on a stroll down the Champs-Élysées! 

 

           At the age of 18 in La Rochelle, I decided to leave my family. The day

           I arrived in Paris, I went for a walk on the Champs-Elysées when

           suddenly I saw a man go through a French window, fall through the

           air, grab at a store sign and crash at my feet. He was bleeding profusely.

           An ambulance arrived and took him to Marmottan hospital. The next day,

           I discovered in the newspapers that it had been Jacques Prévert.

           I have always considered it an omen that the same day I got to Paris,

           a poet fell on my head.

 

    Prévert went into a coma, and was near death, but did survive.    

  

    Soon after, Bergé became the artist Bernard Buffet’s (not, incidentally, one of my favorite artists) lover, and was an important figure in selling that artist’s work. And in 1958, after meeting the young Saint Laurent, he fell in love with the budding seminarian-looking designer from Algeria, establishing not only a romantic relationship, but becoming the guiding force of Saint Laurent’s noted Yves Saint Laurent Haute Couture, which the young designer founded after taking over from the equally renowned Christian Dior. The two first met, without actually knowing it, at Dior’s funeral in 1957, the date in which Lespert’s film begins.

       That relationship, which is at the center of Lespert’s film, was certainly a turbulent one, with Bergé (Guillaume Gallienne)—serving as the saner front-man for the often and increasingly fragile Saint Laurent (Pierre Niney), who despite his first great success at Dior was soon after exiled from the Avenue Montaigne couture heaven with the excuse of the designer’s having been called up for the military (an impossible position for Saint Laurent, particularly had he been called to serve in his native Algeria, fighting to save the very French privileged world in which he grown up). The designer had what was clearly a nervous breakdown, perhaps initiated through drugs and a diagnosis of bi-polar behavior by the military hospital in which he was interred; but again, it was Bergé who came to the rescue, demanding that his lover chose between life or death, sanity or madness. Saint Laurent chose work.

     Yet, it is clear, even in Lespert’s Bergé-approved film, that his protection of the young, always-sensitive—yet, admittedly, “not always nice” artiste—led to resentments among Saint Laurent’s long-time friends and employees, including some of his models such as Loulou de la Falaise (who plays herself). Some even described Bergé negatively as “the pimp who’s found his all-star hooker.”

     And then, as time moved on, and Saint Laurent had numerous successes through his Mondrian shift dress, his Sharienne safari jacket, the “Le Smoking trouser suit, Catherine Deneuve’s wardrobe from Belle de Jour, and his numerous kaftans and other lighter wear, influenced by the fact that he and Pierre had established a second home in Marrakech, Morocco, Pierre becoming the CEO of Saint Laurent’s house.

      But, like so many artists of history, success, particularly in the 1960s and 70s, also meant excess, as the former abstentious Saint Laurent, moved heavily into drinking, cocaine, hashish and other drugs, as well as wilder and wilder sex parties. By 1976, Bergé and Saint Laurent had broken up, although Bergé continued to serve him as the administrator of the company.

    Saint Laurent had, meanwhile, taken up with Karl Lagerfield’s (Nikolai Kinski) boyfriend, the equally troubled Jacques de Bascher (Xavier Lafitte), which further resulted in the life-long hatred between the two competing designers. 

      Yet Bergé’s love remained, and in 2008, a few days before Saint Laurent’s death of brain cancer (the diagnosis of which Bergé had kept from his former lover—who argued, along with several other friends and the doctor, that Saint Laurent would not have been able to psychologically deal with the truth) the couple were joined in a civil ceremony of a same-sex marriage. And it was Bergé who took over their vast art collections—which sold for millions after Saint Laurent’s death—and who became the head of the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent, which loaned out the real costumes to help make Lespert’s movie.

 

Los Angeles, August 11, 2016

Reprinted from US Cinema Review (August 11, 2016).