A biting documentary about the twilight years of Yves Saint Laurent's haute couture fashion house screened at the Berlin Film Festival on Wednesday after a court blocked its release in France.
The French designer bid a graceful "adieu" to fashion after 44 years in 2002 with a show at which Catherine Deneuve sang and other famous clients and muses wept in the front row.
Celebration by Olivier Meyrou goes behind the scenes to show a much less elegant world.
The designer, who is credited with putting women in tuxedos, peacoats and sheer chiffon blouses, is losing his sharp eye and depends on his helpers who treat him like a child.
Shoes don't fit, silver dresses turn out gray and the seamstresses gossip but not as much as his close associates.
The camera captures it all, including staff members conferring about which dress house model Laetitia Casta should wear "because her breasts look too big in that one."
The film includes footage of an interview with a journalist in New York in which the famously tortured Saint Laurent declares that he has decided to "be happy and to work with joy."
At a birthday lunch, Peirre Berge his former lover who ran the business side of the fashion house makes a toast in which he tells the designer and his guests that fashion has destroyed him.
After the film was completed in 2001, Berge went to court in France and managed to prevent its commercial distribution.
The documentary is screening at the 57th Berlinale, which runs until Sunday.
The festival is entering the run-up to the end of the 10-day movie marathon with competition for its top honors starting to hot up.
South Korean director Park Chan-wook's off-the-wall romantic comedy I'm a Cyborg<, But That's Ok quickly emerged as such a point of discussion at the Berlinale, which is one of the world's top three film festivals.
Set in a psychiatric hospital and starring Asian pop sensation Rain, Park's zany, if at times almost baffling movie tells the story of a love affair between two inmates, one of whom thinks she is a human robot or cyborg.
But as the festival enters its final days, the favorites are staring to line up for the festival's coveted Golden Bear.
This includes Irina Palm, with Marianne Faithfull, a tragic comedy from Belgian director Sam Garbarski, about a middle-class London grandmother, Maggie, who is forced to take a job giving clients anonymous hand jobs to help pay her sick grandson's medical bills.
Also proving popular among those attending the Berlinale has been American actor-turned-director Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd, which tells a John Le Carre-style story about the early days of the US Central Intelligence Agency.
Starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, the sometimes slow-moving film focuses on how a young agent essentially sacrifices his family and private life for the sake of his CIA work.
A total of 22 films have been competing at the 2006 Berlinale for the festival's Golden and Silver Bears. The jury is to announce the award winners tomorrow.
Away from awards news, Legendary Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola is to make his second film in a year following a decade-long absence from the big screen. Coppola's last directed feature was the 1997 The Rainmaker.
The Oscar-winning maker of Apocalypse Now, who has recently completed Youth Without Youth, an adaptation of a novel by Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade, is to direct Tetro, a drama about an Argentinian family.
The film will feature Matt Dillon in the lead role, movie industry daily Variety said.
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