DVD reviews: Yves Saint Laurent: L’amour Fou | Horrible Bosses
YVES SAINT LAURENT: L’AMOUR FOU (STUDIO CANAL, £19.99)
GIVEN the essentially frivolous, insular nature of the fashion industry, its most iconic names have been given some pretty over-the-top biopics recently, with Coco Channel in particular supplying the French film industry its own superhero-like mythos from which to construct multiple films. Yves Saint-Laurent: L’amour fou acts as a bit of a corrective simply owing to its sedate tone. That, however, makes its title seem somewhat ironic, even though the “crazy love” between Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé was not short of incident. Filmed the year after Saint-Laurent’s death in 2008, it uses Bergé’s decision to sell off their substantial art collection as a framing device to look back at their life together, chronicling how they fell in love after meeting at the funeral of Saint Laurent’s mentor Christian Lacroix and how, over the next 50 years, they created Saint Laurent’s eponymous, world-conquering fashion house, negotiating his dalliances with drugs and crippling bouts of depression along the way. Sadly, perhaps because Bergé looked after the business side of things, his natural tendency is to recount their life together with a chilly objectivity. The story he’s telling is an interesting one, but it lacks spark.
HORRIBLE BOSSES (WARNER, £19.99)
HORRIBLE Bosses lacks something too – mainly a spine. Revolving around three disgruntled employees who plot to kill their tyrannical bosses, the macabre premise of this wannabe black comedy writes a cheque its mainstream execution can’t cash. Jason Bateman, PJ Byrne and Jason Sudeikis are best friends whose respective employment woes – intimidation, sexual harassment, all-round dickishness – lead them to hatch a flawed plan to murder each other’s superiors, Strangers on a Train-style, so as to maintain their jobs while avoiding their crimes being linked back to them. Needless to say, nothing goes quite to plan, but because the film strives to maintain this trio’s likeability at all times, nothing is quite as funny or as edgy as it could have been. Having said that, as one of the titular bosses, Colin Farrell’s turn as a coke-snorting, combover-sporting moron strikes just the right balance of self-mocking humour and scene-stealing weirdness and there are a few laughs to be had from Jamie Foxx, who cameos as a tough-talking barfly able to exploit the heroes’ racial prejudices for cash by agreeing to become their “murder consultant”. But such things just make you wish Horrible Bosses didn’t keep bottling out.
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