L'AMOUR FOU

L'Amour Fou, Pierre Thoretton's directorial and documentary debut, is a melancholy meditation, a portrait of the partnership between iconic fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his longtime companion, Pierre Berge.

The two Pierres were introduced by Thoretton's former mother-in-law, actress Catherine Deneuve, in the 90s. Sometime later they began meeting for lunch every Thursday to talk about life. The portrait that emerged from their conversations is an intimate, elegiac celebration of two lives inexorably bound.

The film begins with Yves Saint Laurent's announcement, amid popping flashbulbs, of his retirement, in 2002; from there, it cuts to Berge's eloquent observations six years later at Saint _ _ Laurent's funeral—with French president Nicolas Sarkozy in the front row— and follows Berge through the sale of hundreds of art objects the two men collected over the years. Watching Berge dismantle the life he and Saint Laurent built is like watching someone deconstruct the house in which he lived. Berge, who was always behind the scenes, comes across as almost regal in his stoicism, his philosophical determination to separate the objects from the man. "I show that—but I don't believe a word of it," Thoretton says. "Despite what he says, it's just not the way he is. Selling everything was part of his grieving process. The memories were too large to live with following his death." In 2009, Christie's oversaw the "Sale of the Century," at the Grand Palais, in Paris—the auction of the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge Collection, which netted in excess of $450 million. Berge's reaction to the film, Thoretton says, was profound.

"He cried. He said thank you. And he said he'd learned things about himself that he didn't want to talk about—because they were things he didn't like."

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