Bertrand Bonello’s movies coalesce into a saga of political disillusionments. His characters are would-be revolutionaries, doomed youths, and indecisive figures paralyzed in the face of new political futures. Grappling with his cinema requires context of his birth-year. In 1968, France was in the midst of Les Trente Glorieuses —three decades of post-WWII economic development, modernization, and mass consumerism. Despite a long revolutionary lineage, large-scale protest movements lay mostly…
What I really loved about it, as well as the artificiality, was the use of time and space. The film feels really claustrophobic and the character gets into a sort of delirium. That's something I was looking for, for Saint Laurent.