At the tender age of 21, whizz kid Yves St Laurent became the chief designer for the house of Dior and by varying degrees, it was up and downhill from here, depending on your point of view. Not that director Jalil Lespert comes down hard with his own in this rather disappointing biopic about one of fashion's most dazzling artists.

This rather handsome yet rather polite account of YSL's life is episodic cinema – there's Yves the designer, Yves the lover, Yves the manic depressive, the playboy, the friend, the genius, the desperately troubled soul. What there's not is a fully rounded character. Instead Lespert gives us refractions of the man, rather than the man himself. This despite a mesmerising performance from the Comédie-Française's Pierre Niney – he is truly captivating.

Pierre Bergé, YSL's business partner and soul mate (at least, that's how he is portrayed) may have something to do with this resistance to development. It is his memoir upon which this 'authorised' study is based, it is his narration that link chapters, his future self that bookends the film (the principle story is told in flashback). He sets the tone, one that feels withholding despite the frank depiction of Laurent's sexual freedom, his drug and alcohol addictions. A veneer of respectability remains which Lespert doesn't (or won't) crack through and consequently we never really get to meet either man.

Because Bergé places himself at the edge of the frame, he remains a distraction and prevents full access to the events he's observing. Lespert's reluctance to flesh out support characters such as Laurent's thinly sketched parents lightens the load, in the wrong way. Like YSL's ground-breaking designs (many originals were made available for the film), everything remains at a distance, on show. Texture is seen, not felt. Unlike Anne Fontaine's equally pretty but much sturdier study of an artist Coco Before Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, despite its precision and elegant production, remains distinctly prêt-a-porter rather than the haute couture it ought to be.

// COLIN FRASER

Previewed at Sony Theaterette, Sydney, on 17 June 2014