Queen provocateur Catherine Breillat returns to narrative filmmaking and Cannes Competition after a decade-long absence with Last Summer. 75 and hemiplegic, Breillat is nonetheless still eager to challenge. For uninitiated readers, you only need to take a glance at her previous film titles – Fat Girl, Anatomy of Hell – to know what kind of filmmaker she is: fiercely French, no-holds-barred, and problematic in all the best, productive ways. So her return being a remake of a Danish drama from the recent year of 2019 seems too tame, until you find out the plot of the movie, at which point it almost becomes parodic.
Last Summer tells the story of Anne, a mother in a picture-perfect, loving family with two young kids, who has an affair with her 17-year-old stepson Théo from her husband’s previous marriage. To make things ironic to the ludicrous degree, Anne works as a lawyer against child abuse. She inevitably has to deal with the consequences of her affair as it rocks her family and life inside out.
The appearance of tameness is what makes Last Summer so spicy. Gone are the uncomfortable, realist long takes of Fat Girl; Last Summer sports a glossy, conventional, and even commercial-friendly exterior, by French cinema standards at least (by American cinema standards, this is still an overachievement, as the overexposed sun glistens). But it is precisely that picturesque surface that makes Last Summer so alluring – the chasm between something so pleasant-looking and unforgivably fucked up. It, by all means, looks like a standard, serious drama, but it is depicting a crime even the most damaged writers can’t conceive with a straight face, and that tension grips the audience throughout. Everything should look defaced, but a filmmaker as intelligent and curious as Breillat would always choose the uneasier, wider route of keeping up appearances.
Also gone are any prosthetic hard penises and explicit nudity. Breillat no longer needs any shock factor or even allows us the privilege of getting distracted by shock factor. She instead confronts us with a prolonged extreme close-up of Anne and Théo kissing, as she capitalizes on our attraction to scandal; she knows the more immoral it gets, the more obsessed we are. With sex scenes that would get past any censorship board without problems, she nonetheless questions our morality and relationship with sex in cinema.
Like May December, the other mother-boy age-gap movie in Competition this year (what a programming throughline), Last Summer understands the most serious prestige cinema needs a jolt of humor to complete the picture. Building on top of its extreme, inexplicable premise, it often engages in the uncomfortably hilarious, as Anne keeps digging her hole further and further. Breillat even leans into the comedy with playful, informative blocking. For long stretches, this is arguably an unserious, shallow movie without much to offer other than disturbance. But Last Summer does eventually reveal some themes worthy of Breillat’s take on the material. As Anne tries to crawl out of the hole of her own making, Breillat reveals the duplicity of adulthood and the lies it takes to upkeep a healthy family, ironically contrasted with the honesty of the deranged child. With the drama already so heightened, Breillat doesn’t need to lean into any didacticism and lets the complications reveal themselves. As such, we dwell on the concurrent layers of immorality, surely a more rewarding experience than being battered with a PSA of the evils of pedophilia, as an American version wouldn’t forget to include. Even in a premise as absurd and incredulous as this, Breillat finds truth, especially in its thorny, contradictory, ironic ways. She naturally also explores her usual theme of women’s desire, without shying away from its dark sides.
In the year of serving cunt (don’t ask me how this became a viral phrase, much more an acceptable part of the American lexicon), Léa Drucker might have won the race. She plays Anne with ice-cold professionalism and red-hot virility, somehow a battle-ready lawyer and smitten teenage girl all at once. Her performance becomes all the more delectable when she enters what I call “the Benedetta phase,” i.e. when she doubles down on her supposed righteousness as she clearly knows she’s in the wrong, all with a straight face, of course. This is a diva villain performance built for the most fervent actresssexuals, truly capturing the pleasures of evil like Anne’s very own forbidden fruit. Complementing her is Samuel Kircher’s Théo, a solid discount Timothée Chalamet in what must already be the global film industry’s Mark V of this manufacturing line (Kircher is a nepo baby special).
Catherine Breillat will never make a movie in which she outright condemns having sex with your stepson, as lessons are better left for the classroom, not the cinema. She simply cannot resist one last complication of the story, as she elevates her source material into truly twisted territory. And French cinema is the only place where you can ask or entertain, even just for one second, what if fucked up? What if we fuck it up? (Goddamn American conservatism and its descent into puritanical sex-negativity.) As she toes that line, the tension climaxes, and she shows the value of trusting your audience. She doesn’t need to educate the audience because she knows her audience is educated enough to entertain the consideration of the transgressive.