L'amour fou (2010) Reviews

• Rich fashion

  stensson2010-11-11

  It begins with a totally sick Christies auction, which could make any Tea Party member go communist. Yves Saint-Laurent's lover, or shall we say lifetime love, is selling their furniture for fantasy prizes. It's a beautiful home, which certainly could have remained a museum. We follow YSL through his career, starting as an assistant to Christian Dior. It develops into a life full of fame, celebration, meeting the most well-known people in the world, but also of despair and depression. A life he wants to end many times. Upperclass problems if anything was. But you can't help getting touched by the destiny of this very shy and nervous person. A terrible snob with kind eyes.

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• a chilly view of a relationship

  MOscarbradley2015-08-17

  "L'Amour Fou" is a documentary narrated by Yves Saint Laurent's romantic and business partner Pierre Berge about the life they shared for 50 years, focusing naturally on Saint Laurent's work but perhaps more surprisingly on the vast collection of paintings, sculptures and objects d'art that they amassed over their years together and, of course, on the love they had for each other. Theirs was a marriage of sorts, perhaps not made in heaven, but enduring and certainly passionate, a testament not just to the stability of gay relationships but of the ability to survive a life lived almost entirely in the spotlight, (though, of course, there were as many guns as roses in the relationship). It's very simply made, (the director is Pierre Thoretton), with no narration other than Berge's and a few other talking heads from Saint Laurent's life. We are never nudged in any direction but left to make up our own minds. If the film has a fault it's that it never settles on any one point of view and in the end leaves us feeling rather chilly.

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• Why did Bergé sell everything immediately?

  filmalamosa2012-05-29

  A documentary on Yves Saint Laurent's professional life from the age of 20 on as told mainly by his partner Pierre Bergé. It is interesting to look inside a world that one knows nothing about-- What appears on the everyday street is so far removed from the weird out of the world outfits of these fashion houses. They must have to make any serious money off accessories = purple purses and matching earrings and so forth... My overriding question is why did Bergé sell off everything the minute Saint Laurent was dead?....that does not speak of a healthy relationship no matter how you try to dress it up. People who really love someone want to leave everything the same. Some lame excuse is offered that a museum was too expensive, I don't buy it. Bergé got some enormous sum from the auction 500 million Euros or something. Bergé is a bit of a dour lower middle class pedestrian man strange combination. It is an interesting exploration of a successful gay man's life. How often do we see that? RECOMMEND 7 Stars

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• What a horrible, horrible man

  jm107012017-05-24

  This is NOT an inspiring story of gay love that endures through the years, despite what online descriptions and reviews say. It is the story of a greedy, grasping, manipulative, totally unscrupulous and cold-hearted little "businessman" who latched onto a young, highly gifted but pathologically shy and depressed fashion designer. He drove that damaged kid into a life so full of stress that he sought relief in drugs and then finally burned out before he got old and spent his last couple of decades in tortured isolation. It's a heartbreaking and disgusting story. Although they had broken up as a couple decades earlier, in order to make doubly sure that he ended up with all the loot, the huckster married the designer just a few days before he died of brain cancer, hardly in any condition to make reasonable choices. As soon as the funeral was over, he shifted into high gear to maximize his profit from selling the designer's lovingly assembled art collection, which put another half-billion dollars in his already overstuffed pockets. What a horrible, horrible man. Forget what he "did" for the shallow, spurious world of high fashion--he's a self-serving monster who has earned every horror that will come to him eventually.

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