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Critics Consensus: A well-intentioned but frustratingly diffuse biopic, Saint Laurent proves an ironically poor fit for a look at the life of a fashion icon.
Critic Consensus: A well-intentioned but frustratingly diffuse biopic, Saint Laurent proves an ironically poor fit for a look at the life of a fashion icon.
All Critics (84) | Top Critics (29) | Fresh (50) | Rotten (34)
It captures the tense flavor of a particularly heady time in Saint Laurent's life, during which he struggled with addiction and illness and juggled relationships ...
Saint Laurent was a truly mythic figure. It's a shame that Bonello's film doesn't do him justice.
Repetitive, repulsive, empty while stuffed with cheap ennui and wholly lacking in either insight or inspiration, "Saint Laurent" is absolutely everything you don't want to see in a biographical film.
Saint Laurent comes across as a prisoner of his own genius, at once compelling and pathetic.
A flamboyant but hollow exercise in glitz and pizzazz, Saint Laurent is a riot of colors, hedonism and nonsense.
Bonello makes good use of mirrors and reflective surfaces throughout the film, all very fitting for a story about a boy as beautiful and as self-absorbed as Narcissus himself.
Just as Bonello's anachronisms blithely cross disparate eras, so Saint Laurent gainsaid the passage of time.
Director Bertrand Bonello ... weave[s] a languorous but transfixing portrait of artistic life and the decadence that often comes with it.
Saint Laurent is the filmic equivalent of drinking a bottle of absinthe. Even after leaving the theater, its green haze is not easily shaken off.
Saint Laurent is aesthetically rich, with exacting production design and a semi-jaundiced sepia hue that periodically evokes the brittleness of an aging newspaper.
An unauthorized biopic that dwells in some of the darkest passages of Saint Laurent where his addictions and infidelities are a common thing. [Full review in Spanish]
Bertrand Bonello's film shares more DNA with Olivier Assayas's Carlos than the September Issue (magazine or documentary), and prioritizes action, energy, and form over lengthy explications of history or psychology.
It's an admirably unconventional biopic filled with wonderful sequences of bold stylistic choices but it's also about 30 minutes too long.
Super Reviewer
Half of one star for the memory of Laurent's greatest designs, which can only fade after this. Minus 4.5 for the film, rendering the final score -3.5, for a thinly veiled excuse for putting gay porn into mainstream cinemas. If you are thinking of taking your daughter along for the glamour and haute couture, think again. That part is depicted only prosaically, and does not qualify as biopic because it only skims his best achievements. The film concentrates on a voyeuristic account of Laurent's personal life, and even that is done badly. There is copious drug abuse, male homosexual pornography verging on hard core and pretty sordid, without any meaningful connection of these to Laurent's work, and relentless product commercialism to put the holiday shop sales to shame. There is so much cigarette smoking that you are in danger of asphyxiation just by watching. The film is patronising to women, contrary to even the tokenistic mention of women at the end. There is an unforgivable and all too real looking scene of animal suffering. Worst of all, Laurent is depicted as a vapid type, when his work was full of edge and bite and assurance. You see very little of the creative soul of the man. If this film was a dress, it would be on special in a low grade novelty store, in a dingy market somewhere not nearly as nice as you want to think that Paris is.
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