It didn’t get great reviews upon its release; and it didn’t really deserve them. However, the clothes are beautiful, the film in general looks handsome, and it’s one of the few films I can think of that’s about the maintenance of a long-term relationship, about what happens after a gay couple move in and what they do to stay together. I found moments of it deeply moving.

Pierre Niney as Yves Saint Laurent is slightly repressed, as if he’d make his effeminacy public and dangerous when not coiled into himself; shy but self-centred; nervous and on the verge of hysteria – a great performance. Nikolai Kinski, who greatly resembles his father Klaus, plays Karl Lagerfeld, to lesser effect than Niney’s St. Laurent, perhaps because Lagerfeld is currently more familiar to us, but with great presence and charisma. Xavier Lafitte is Jacques Des Bascher, who supports St. Laurent throughout and who turns out, perhaps self-servingly, to be the hero if not the subject of the story. It’s mostly all still about drugs, sex, haute couture and low-down loucheness , which is stereotypical but which I like.

José Arroyo