Review: Celebration Finds Fashion Legend Yves Saint Laurent at His Most Elusive

Olivier Meyrou’s documentary Celebration opens with a black-and-white close-up of Yves Saint Laurent’s hand hesitating over a sketch. Then, the fashion designer is called away before he can add anything to the ensemble he’s designing. This lengthy opening shot emblematizes the portrait of Saint Laurent drawn by Celebration: Even though it follows the designer’s eponymous haute couture firm over the course of a productive period in the late 1990s, the film finds its namesake hesitant and reclusive.

Originally commissioned by Saint Laurent’s business partner and onetime companion, Pierre Bergé, Celebration had been suppressed for over a decade after Bergé, who died in 2017, reportedly didn’t care for its depiction of his and Saint Laurent’s company. (Saint Laurent died in 2008, the year after the documentary’s initial premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.) Although the film is no journalistic exposé, it implies through carefully selected imagery and a subtle narrative structure that, as Saint Laurent retreated into his shell, Bergé became a domineering presence in their company, lording over his former lover and collaborator.

But Celebration could be read as implying that it was the other way around: that, perhaps, it was Bergé’s ambition and overriding presence that turned Laurent inward. A particularly resonant shot in the film racks focus from a distracted Saint Laurent in the foreground to an ominously shadowed Bergé observing him unnoticed from around a corner in the background. Bergé makes no bones about keeping Saint Laurent in the background while he manages their company. Speaking with a journalist later, Bergé cites a quip from author Marguerite Duras about the sleepy-eyed Saint Laurent, adding to it his own conclusion that “Yves should be left asleep.” That’s best for the company and the quality of its collection, Bergé means to point out, but he adds, rather shockingly: “It’s true that he is not happy.”

The film’s camera often catches the elusive Saint Laurent indirectly in a mirror, or shoots him from a distance, in black and white. When we do get a full-color close-up of him, it’s often from behind or in profile, taken by a handheld camera following him backstage at a fashion award show. Celebration compiles an image of the man and his company that’s intriguingly alienating. Every once in a while, the sparse score by François-Eudes Chanfrault, consisting of either dry percussion or pulsing electronic tones, slides in under the images, giving the YSL company’s colorful dresses and exacting fitting procedures an unexpectedly dour tone. A patriotically themed collection made for a grandiose display at the 1998 World Cup is displayed without fanfare, and at a cold distance, relayed partially through a muted television.

Saint Laurent’s impenetrability and Bergé’s glad-handing personality contrast with the current and former seamstresses who appear in the documentary, all of whom laugh, complain, chatter, critique their work, and in general behave like human beings. Pointedly, Meyrou shows us much more of them constructing and adjusting the fashion house’s designs than of Saint Laurent himself at work. Both he and Bergé are shown to be separated from the labor of fashion: At one point, Meyrou includes an awkward encounter between Bergé and a representative from a seamstress’s union, in which the fashion mogul patronizingly explains which unions he prefers and why young seamstresses are untrustworthy.

All of this, of course, might have more intrinsic interest if one is already familiar with some of the background of YSL. Despite some discussion of the firm’s origin in the early ’60s, the film provides little context for its importance in the industry, or the personal backstories that inform the mostly unspoken dynamic between former lovers Saint Laurent and Bergé. It’s also surely relevant, though unacknowledged in the film, that Gucci bought the YSL brand in 1999, the year after a bulk of Meyrou’s footage was captured, and that Saint Laurent ended the haute couture line in 2002. The ironically titled Celebration weaves a tightly constructed story about success, power, and mortality that, to an extent, is universal but could have fashioned a more revealing—and grounded—documentary out of the same material.