L'Amour Fou

L'Amour Fou

L'amour fou translated into English means crazy love or mad love.  It is also the title of a new documentary about the love of more than 50 years between fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner in business and life, Pierre Bergé.  Listening to Pierre Bergé speak at Yves funeral is enough to make even the most hardened heart cry with sadness.  Theirs was a love that endured even through Yves' issues with drugs and alcohol.  The filmmaker, Pierre Thoretton, met the legendary designer through his former wife, Chiara Mastroianni, whose mother is Catherine Deneuve.  He originally wanted to focus on the couple’s homes but quickly realized the story lay not in the interiors Saint Laurent and Bergé had created, but in their enduring relationship. “I have never met a couple that has stuck together for 50 years, through the ups and downs, and I thought it was simply extraordinary,” he says. “Their love was unconditional. I have never seen anything like it and it still blows me away.” Pierre Bergé also generously opened up to the director about his decision to sell their art collection at Christie's after Yves death. Their close friends Betty Catroux and Loulou de la Falaise are also included in the documentary that debuted at the Toronto Film Festival recently.  It will be released in Europe on September 22nd but I'm not sure when we'll be able to see L'Amour Fou in the States.  As Yves Saint Laurent famously once said, "fashions fade, style is eternal," and in this case, love is also eternal.