The fashion-world biopic Saint Laurent has become the 56th film to be submitted for the race for best foreign-language film Oscar, after it was selected as the official French nomination.

Directed by Bertrand Bonello, Saint Laurent stars Gaspard Ulliel as the legendary designer, and received its world premiere earlier this year at the Cannes film festival, where the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described it as “a well-made but bafflingly airless and claustrophobic film … and sentimentally indulgent to the last”. It is the second of two French biopics of the designer to be released in 2014, following the Jalil Lespert-directed Yves Saint Laurent – which itself may have expected to receive Oscar favour after securing a US distribution deal with the Weinstein Company.

Saint Laurent faces a considerable struggle to reach the next round. The strongest entries so far appear to be Belgium’s Two Days, One Night, the Dardenne brothers’ ecstatically received redundancy fable starring Marion Cotillard, Turkey’s Palme d’Or winner Winter Sleep from auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Poland’s Ida, the unsettling family drama directed by Paweł Pawlikowski.

Other strong contenders at this stage include Xavier Dolan’s much-admired Mommy, submitted by Canada; Israel’s Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, a selection at Cannes and Toronto, by sister-brother film-makers Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz; and Mauritania’s Timbuktu, a Cannes hit for director Abderrahmane Sissako.

The deadline for submissions is 1 October, after which the Academy’s foreign language film award committee whittles down the list to nine finalists – at which point a second committee votes to produce the five-strong official nomination list. This is announced on 15 January 2015, along with the rest of the Oscar nominations, and is then voted on by all Academy members.

The foreign-language film honours will be handed out at the Oscars awards ceremony in Los Angeles on 22 February.