French biopic Yves Saint Laurent is at once sincere and reductive. Framed as a reminiscence by his business and life partner Pierre Bergé (Guillaume Gallienne), the movie sometimes plays like a telefilm truncated for a pre-arranged timeslot on Lifetime. The majority of its running time is allotted for the most interesting part of course, the meteoric rise of Saint Laurent (Pierre Niney). Before becoming a famed couturier in his own right he was an assistant to another fashion icon, Christian Dior, whose untimely death placed Saint Laurent atop the House of Dior as head designer at the unprecedented age of 21. Other formative experiences, such as a hospitalization that included electroshock therapy after his aborted conscription into the French Army, are elided over in a manner not unlike that of a footnote in a magazine profile.
