Catherine Breillat Is Back, Baby

The transgressive French filmmaker is in fine, fucked-up form with Last Summer, about a middle-age lawyer who starts sleeping with her stepson. Photo: Janus Films

When Anne (Léa Drucker) has sex with her 17-year-old stepson, she closes and sometimes covers her eyes. It’s a pose that brings to mind what people say about the tradition of draping a napkin over your head before eating ortolan, that the idea is to prevent God from witnessing what you’re about to do. Théo (Samuel Kircher) is as fine-boned as any songbird — “You’re so slim!” Anne gasps in what sounds almost like pain during one of their encounters, as she runs her hands up his rangy torso — and just as forbidden. And despite the fact that what she’s doing could blow up her life, she can’t stay away. It wouldn’t be fair to say that desire is a form of madness in Last Summer, a family drama as masterfully propulsive as a horror movie. Anne remains upsettingly clear-eyed about what’s happening, as though to suggest otherwise would be a cop-out. But desire is powerful, enough to compel this bourgeois middle-age professional into betraying everything she stands for in a few breathtaking turns.

Last Summer is the first film in a decade from director Catherine Breillat, the taboo-loving legend behind the likes of Fat Girl and Romance. Last Summer, which Breillat and co-writer Pascal Bonitzer adapted from the 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts, could be described as tame only in comparison to Rocco Siffredi drinking a teacup full of tampon water in Anatomy of Hell, but there is a lulling sleekness to the way it lays out its setting that turns out to be deceptive. Anne and her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) live with their two adopted daughters in a handsome house surrounded by sun-dappled countryside, a lifestyle sustained by the business dealings that frequently require Pierre to travel. Anne’s sister and closest friend Mina (Clotilde Courau) works as a manicurist in town, and conversations between the two make it clear that they didn’t grow up in the kind of ease Anne currently enjoys. It’s a luxury that allows her to pursue a career that seems more driven by idealism than by financial concerns. Anne is a lawyer who represents survivors of sexual assault, a detail that isn’t ironic, exactly, so much as it represents just how much individual actions can be divorced from broader beliefs.

In the opening scene, Anne dispassionately questions an underage client about her sexual history. She informs the girl that she should expect the defense to paint her as promiscuous before reassuring her that judges are accustomed to this tactic. The sequence outlines how familiar Anne is with the narratives used to discredit accusers, but also highlights a certain flintiness to her character. Drucker’s performance is impressively hard-edged even before Anne ends up in bed with her stepson. There’s a restlessness to the character behind the sleek blonde hair and businesswoman shifts, a desire to think of herself as unlike other women and as more interesting than the buttoned-up normies her husband brings by for dinner. Anne enjoys her well-coiffed life, but she also feels impatient with it, and when Théo gets dropped into her lap after being expelled from school in Geneva for punching his teacher, he triggers something in her that’s not just about lust. Théo is still very much a kid, something Breillat emphasizes by showcasing the messes he leaves around the house as much as on his sulky, half-formed beauty. But that rebelliousness speaks to Anne, who finds something invigorating in aligning herself with callow passion and impulsiveness instead of stultifying adulthood — however temporarily.

This being a Breillat film, the sex is Last Summer’s proving ground, the place where all those tensions about gender and class and age meet up with the inexorability of the flesh. The first time Anne sleeps with Théo, it’s shot from below, as though the camera’s lying in bed beside the woman as she looks up at the boy on top of her. It’s a point of view that makes the audience complicit in the scene, but that also dares you not to find its spectacle hot. Breillat is an avid button-pusher responsible for some of the more disturbing depictions of sexuality to have ever been committed to screen, but Last Summer refuses to defang its main character by portraying her simply as a predatory molester. Instead, she’s something more complicated — a woman trying to have things both ways, to dabble in the transgressive without risking her advantageous perch in the mainstream, and to wield the weapons of the victim-blaming society she otherwise battles when they are to her advantage. It’s not the sex that harms Théo; it’s the mindfuck of what he’s subjected to. After dreamily playing tourist in Théo’s youthful existence, Anne drags him into the brutal realities of the grown-up world. The results are unflinching and breathtakingly ugly. You couldn’t be blamed for wanting to look away.