By Jake Wilson
Last Summer ★★★★½
(MA15+) 104 minutes
“That crosses so many red lines,” one character tells another during a heated argument in Last Summer. Pretty much the average working day for Catherine Breillat, one of the great living French filmmakers, whose first feature in a decade shows that she’s lost neither her skill nor her daring.
Lea Drucker, Olivier Rabourdin (who plays her husband, Pierre) and Samuel Kircher (background) in Last Summer.Credit: Potential Films
Last Summer isn’t sexually explicit in the manner of some of Breillat’s earlier features, such as the 1999 Romance. All the same, it’s a provocation, as well as a gripping story (the script by Breillat and Pascal Bonitzer is based on the 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts, though significant changes have been made, including the ending).
Aged about 50, the heroine Anne (Lea Drucker) is a successful lawyer working for child protection services, happily married to the older Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin). Elegant and outwardly cool-headed, she seems to have everything she could want, yet she’s prepared to risk it all for a secret affair with her 17-year-old stepson, Theo (newcomer Samuel Kircher), a sulky boy with a mocking, reckless smile.
All sorts of things about this scenario are liable to divide audiences, including whether this relationship is remotely credible (though stranger things have undoubtedly occurred), and whether Anne is simply a predator and Theo a victim.
For her part, Breillat plainly has no investment in the law as a final arbiter, nor does she offer a moral judgment of her own. Rather, the film suggests that when desire takes hold, morality flies out the window: all kinds of betrayals and transgressions can occur, which is not something to be lamented but the nature of life.
Lea Drucker and Samuel Kircher in Last Summer.Credit: Potential Films
At the same time, Last Summer is a lesson in what the art of direction is all about. As Anne and Theo draw closer, the film makes its own bid to seduce: much of the action takes place outdoors on sunny afternoons, against a backdrop of casual affluence, which Breillat is as clear-eyed about as she is about the plot.
The staging is simple, mostly in wide shot, with the camera moving closer at moments of emotional and physical intensity. One subject of the film is how even the most innocent gestures are loaded with meaning; another is the mystery of faces, which can reveal everything or nothing.
It could be that Breillat’s secret weapon as an artist is simply her personality, which compels her cast to give her things they might not offer up elsewhere. In Last Summer that includes not just the leads but others, like Serena Hu and Angela Chen, the little girls who play Anne and Pierre’s adopted daughters. Present on the sidelines throughout the film, they don’t seem to be acting, just doing the kinds of things that children do: debating the existence of werewolves, or bouncing on a trampoline in the garden.
Sometimes Theo joins them, reminding us he’s not entirely over the line separating childhood from adulthood – and that children carry within themselves all the possibilities of the adult future, in a less formed and therefore freer way.
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