All About Yves, but More About Pierre

Yves Saint Laurent's mother gently chides him about not knowing how to change a lightbulb. He doesn't need to, Yves fires back. If he needs a lightbulb changed, all he has to do is call his lover, Pierre.

Nearly a year after its premiere at Cannes in 2014, Bertrand Bonello's film Saint Laurent, a biopic on the life of the famed French designer, comes out today in the U.S. Made without the authorization of—and with immense opposition from—the aforementioned Pierre (as in Bergé, Yves' longtime companion and surviving business partner), the film explores a tumultuous decade in the designer's life.

Bonello's film is the latest in a long line of cinematic attempts to document Yves Saint Laurent, joining the ranks of David Teboul's two-part documentary Yves Saint Laurent: His Life and Times (2002) and Yves Saint Laurent: 5 Avenue Marceau 75116 Paris (2002), plus Pierre Thoretton's L'Amour Fou (2011) and Jalil Lespert's Yves Saint Laurent (2014). The designer's transformation from a shy, teetotalling, awkward Dior protege to a celebrated fixture of the Parisian party scene in the 1970s, combined with his sartorial genius and frequent struggles with alcoholism and addiction, made his life a storied myth that's rivaled only by Gabrielle Chanel herself.

Bonello and the film's producers, Eric and Nicolas Altmayer, met with François-Henri Pinault, the CEO of Kering, which owns the present-day YSL brand, and obtained permission to reproduce the clothes, names and logos. However, the Altmayer project began taking shape at the same time as Jalil Lespert's similarly titled Yves Saint Laurent, and Bonello's film became infamous for having elicited Bergé's legal wrath.

Bergé, nicknamed "the Dean of Yves Saint Laurent," is notorious for the ironclad control he exerts over any association with the YSL brand, and was reportedly incensed at not being approached for his input, which the Altmayer brothers attempted to defend as "freedom of expression."

"Two films on YSL? I hold the moral rights over YSL's work, his image and mine and have only authorised Jalil Lespert. A trial on the cards?" he tweeted. Berge's lawyers promptly shot off a letter to Bonello's producers, saying that any use of their image and any intrusion into their private life would not be tolerated. Bergé then proceeded to very publicly deny Bonello any access whatsoever to the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent's archives, which owns 5,000 garments, 15,000 accessories and 35,000 sketches by the designer. Instead, he chose to bestow his archival blessing onto Lespert's project, giving him access to the Fondation's arsenal of garments, each sent with a personal handler to supervise it on set, and also granted Lespert permission to film at the couple's home in Morocco.

The decision not to approach Bergé for his input on the project was one of creative freedom, says Bonello, as he did not want the notoriously controlling Bergé disrupting his vision of the project, which admittedly takes a few creative liberties with the script. Bonello, whose films like On War and The Pornographer explore what it means to make great art, wanted to create a film that stayed true to the life of his subject, but was also highly personal at the same time. "In each sequence, I have to put something of myself," he says. This becomes evident when Betty Catroux (played by Aymeline Valade) grooves lithely to Creedence Clearwater Revival's version of "I Put A Spell on You" in her leather suit, or when Yves checks into a hotel to do a fictitious tell-all interview with a journalist under the false name of "Mr. Swann" (so dubbed for the hero of Proust's In Search of Lost Time).

"Mr. Bergé is a man of control. And me, I like my freedom," says Bonello, speaking to Newsweek before a screening of the film at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade theater. "Kering allowed both films to use the logos, and once they allowed us to reproduce the dresses, Pierre Bergé couldn't do anything. It was just intimidation."

Bergé needn't have called the lawyers, as his extreme investment in the legacy of Yves Saint Laurent is represented more as touchingly maternal and genuinely caring, rather than obsessive, in the film. The movie's Bergé (played to cantankerous perfection by Jérémie Renier) goes to great lengths to find another dog with the exact same black patches on its neck, to replace the one that died by overdosing on Yves's pills, because he cannot bear to see the latter's dejection. In another pivotal scene, Bergé announces to the brand's American shareholder that he'd like to buy back "his name."

"Your name?" scoffs the skeptical Yank.

He has good reason to claim the name has his own, as both in real life and onscreen it was Bergé who salvaged the wreckage left behind by Yves's alternating episodes of depression and inspired genius, his drug use and alcoholism. It was Bergé's ruthless business mien upon which the Saint Laurent empire was built -- a thankless service that garnered none of the universal celebration that Yves's brilliance as a couturier did.

The real-life Bergé has been candid about the resignation he felt in his relationship with Yves, telling The New York Times in 2011 that "when you have a relationship with an alcoholic, a drug user, you are forced to have very difficult relations. What can we do? Nothing. Just to accept the fact. To try to help, yes, which I did, with not many successes. But I did it."

The exchange between a 33-year old Yves and his mother, albeit minor, serves as a metaphor for the trajectory of the years in which the film is set. At his peak, Yves Saint Laurent's lot in life was to make phenomenal clothes and capture Paris, and for any inanities, he had the lifelong support of another man who would gladly attend to them.

"Do not let him destroy us," is the onscreen-Bergé's refrain to Yves, gently communicating his pained knowledge of the latter's affair with a pretty male model, Jacques de Bascher (a suitably dandy Louis Garrel).

The vulnerability is momentary, as the Bergé onscreen then proceeds to dispose of de Bascher in typical Bergé fashion: by forcing himself into de Bascher's apartment, and strong-arming him into abandoning Yves with no explanation. The real-life Bergé would almost certainly approve.