Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent in a still from the film “Celebration.”Creditvia Playtime
It is, yet again, an Yves Saint Laurent moment. Granted, these days they seem to come around like clockwork, but even by the standards of 2014, when back-to-back biopics were dueling for filmgoers, this autumn is particularly notable.
On Oct. 30 and Oct. 31, the most recent of at least seven auctions eulogizing the impossibly lush lifestyle Mr. Saint Laurent shared with Pierre Bergé, his business and erstwhile romantic partner (the men ceased to be a couple in 1976), was held at Sotheby’s Paris, bringing in just under $33 million, with buyers’ premiums. On the block were the contents of Mr. Bergé’s houses in Paris and Provence and two he shared with Mr. Saint Laurent in Deauville and Tangier.
Now, a newly edited version of “Celebration,” a long-suppressed documentary on the designer by Olivier Meyrou (“Beyond Hatred”), is opening in Paris, depicting Mr. Saint Laurent as a poignant if tragically addled figure in the years leading up to his retirement in 2002 at 65.
Watching the designer as his cigarette ash grows longer and his gaunt neck swims in his shirt collar is so painful that you want to look away. It’s the film Mr. Bergé never wanted anyone to see, and the story of how it finally came to light reveals just how obsessed fashion is with its own mythology, and what is revealed when the curtain is raised.
It all started promisingly enough. Mr. Bergé gave Mr. Meyrou broad access to shadow him and Mr. Saint Laurent from 1998 to 2001, before souring on the project and suing Mr. Meyrou to prevent its release, according to Nicolas Brigaud-Robert, a principal of Playtime, the film’s distribution company.
The original “Celebration” was shown once, at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2007, before it was blocked, said Alexis Hamaide, also of Playtime.
“Mr. Bergé did not like the way the documentary portrayed him,” Mr. Brigaud-Robert recalled. He did not want to show, Mr. Brigaud-Robert said, “that aspect of his relationship with Mr. Saint Laurent,” referring to the parent-child way the two interacted.
“Mr. Bergé won the suit because he had not signed a release authorizing use of his image,” Mr. Brigaud-Robert said, but Mr. Saint Laurent died in 2008, and Mr. Bergé last year, and “as image rights expire with you, ‘Celebration’ is freed,” he continued. “There is no pending litigation.”
Mr. Brigaud-Robert stressed that the version being released now is in no way softer than the original. “The editing had to do with credits, minor things, maybe 30 seconds in all.” A spokesman for the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation said in an email that it “has no comment to make on the film ‘Celebration.’”
In a director’s statement, Mr. Meyrou said that he treated Mr. Saint Laurent like a species of rare fauna during filming, opting “for an approach that is very close to a wildlife documentary.”
He sat discreetly for days on the floor of the designer’s studio, waiting for him to make an appearance. “Just like big cats must sooner or later come to a watering hole,” Mr. Meyrou said. Mr. Saint Laurent finally showed, morose and twitching.
But it isn’t Mr. Saint Laurent who takes up the most screen time in this mordant film; it’s his star maker. Mr. Bergé’s position in “Celebration” is that the couturier’s anguish is his “backbone,” necessary for him to create. “He’s like a sleepwalker,” he says. “You mustn’t wake him.”
By simply hanging back, Mr. Meyrou, a removed documentarian, allows Mr. Bergé to exceed his reputation as a choleric supreme commander whose highest opinion is of himself.
Indeed, Mr. Bergé’s hubris gets plenty of airing, including a meltdown over photographers at a runway show to a sneering set piece in a cherry picker high above the Place de la Concorde in Paris.
Rising to the heavens, Mr. Bergé explains that he and Mr. Saint Laurent underwrote the gold capstone being placed on the Luxor Obelisk “for the community.” He tells Mr. Meyrou, “As you well know, sponsorship doesn’t interest me very much ordinarily. I leave that to others who think sponsorship is like selling a brand of detergent, with some royal highness you give a handbag to.”
That’s a barely disguised dig at the Lady Dior, famously carried by Princess Diana, not to mention all the quid pro quo relationships between celebrities and designers that followed, though Mr. Bergé and Mr. Saint Laurent were hardly innocent on that score themselves. They engaged Catherine Deneuve to shill for the company for decades.
Perhaps as a result, the director reserves his affection for the supporting cast of atelier heads and petites mains who stake their honor on pleasing “Monsieur,” ripping out the offending “noisy” lining of a coat dress, taking in a gown so minutely that the adjustment is measured by “the hair of a frog.”
The American garden designer Madison Cox, Mr. Bergé’s widower and the source of much pain to Mr. Saint Laurent, is glimpsed only once and out of focus, at a 1999 CFDA awards ceremony in New York, detached from a squad of obsequious courtiers. After more than 30 years of intimate friendship, the muse Betty Catroux comes across as touching and pathetic, justifying to Mr. Saint Laurent why she’s not wearing a certain necklace.
Katoucha Niane, an adored model, is shown slipping easily into a dress she had first worn 10 years earlier. “That’s the strength of Saint Laurent, darling,” she tells her fitter, “it’s not me.” (In 2008, Ms. Niane’s body was found floating in the Seine weeks after she had disappeared from her houseboat. Her death at 47 was ruled accidental, a finding challenged by her family, who suspected murder.)
Generally, models knew Mr. Bergé as the whip-cracking stage manager who queued their catwalk entrances season after season, year after year, at the Hotel Intercontinental.
Near the end of “Celebration” Mr. Bergé finally falls into the trap Mr. Meyrou has been laying for him all along, and the jealousy and frustration of the puppet master is laid bare for all to see. “May I share this award with you?” Mr. Bergé asks Mr. Saint Laurent at a C FDA ceremony in 1999, taking the designer’s Lifetime Achievement statuette and playing directly to the camera. “Thaaank you,” he says unctuously. “Probably I have a part of that.”
Probably he does, though what this film most reveals is the price he and Mr. Saint Laurent paid along the way — which is exactly what both tried to hide. In the end, Mr. Meyrou takes no pity on the titanic executive.
“Celebration” opens on Nov. 14, Mr. Bergé’s birthday.
