The Brooklyn Rail

Seventy-five-year-old filmmaker Catherine Breillat boasts familiar formal fascinations as well as distinct departures from her nearly fifty-year-spanning filmography with Last Summer (L'été dernier, 2023), a riveting and relevant adaptation of the 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts (Dronningen).

It feels inappropriate to label the French provocateur’s first film since 2014 as a clean-cut cinematic comeback. While it incorporates a litany of the filmmaker’s oeuvre-encompassing trademarks—female psychosexuality, corruption of innocence, the ever-shifting nature of carnal power dynamics—the film also boasts several deviations from Breillat’s overarching filmography.

For one, it’s the first movie remake she’s ever tackled, adapting May el-Toukhy’s film in a manner that’s overwhelmingly faithful until it’s emphatically not. The director is certainly no stranger to foreign source material, having made her own versions of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales Bluebeard (2009) and The Sleeping Beauty (2010) as well as basing her 2007 film The Last Mistress on a novel by nineteenth-century French writer Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly.

What’s particularly interesting about this reimagining is that Last Summer has the distinction of featuring Breillat as a co-writer (alongside prolific French scribe Pascal Bonitzer, who most recently collaborated on the screenplay for Paul Verhoeven’s 2021 film Benedetta), a major departure for an artist who has predominantly looked to her own literary output—and personal life—for narrative fodder. Her films A Real Young Girl (1976), 36 Fillette (1988) and Anatomy of Hell (2004) were adapted from novels Breillat herself penned, while Sex Is Comedy (2002) and Abuse of Weakness (2013) respectively address her experience directing the iconic 2001 New French Extremity entry Fat Girl and the aftermath of a debilitating stroke she suffered. Upon deeper reflection, though, Last Summer presents as a continued interrogation of Breillat’s own political position on the legitimacy of certain sexual assault allegations.

The film centers on Anne (an excellent Léa Drucker)—a lawyer who specializes in rape cases and custody disputes involving minors, namely girls—and the ironic forbidden relationship she develops with Théo (impressive newcomer Samuel Kircher), the seventeen-year-old estranged son of her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin). At first, Théo’s integration into the family’s idyllic life (complete with adorably droll adopted sisters Angela and Serena, a bucolic estate, and an off-screen vacation chalet) proves challenging, largely due to the boy’s lingering resentment for Pierre’s absence during his upbringing in Geneva.

Initially acting as a professionally-seasoned mediator of sorts (“I see mixed-up kids like you every day”), Anne develops a bond with Théo after agreeing to keep a major transgression on the teen’s part secret from Pierre in exchange for his active participation in the family. What begins as playful ribbing and emotional transparency soon veers toward sexually-charged exchanges, ranging from a crude stick-and-poke tattoo session to divulging intimate personal details over a pint. When flirtation eventually gives way to fornication, the resulting sex scene fixes solely on Théo’s face; curly tresses fall over his brow, with squinting eyes and upturned, open lips reminiscent of an adolescent breathless from play as opposed to a man satiating his sexual appetite. It’s an uncomfortable scene to witness, yet also evokes latent memories of our own youthful sexual dalliances. Where have we found power—or lack thereof—in our budding pursuit of pleasure?

In fact, the encounter immediately provokes Anne’s introspection about her own sexual coming-of-age, which is alluded to having been traumatic. After Théo discovers a dictaphone (an entertaining technological relic), he interviews Anne as a form of foreplay. When he probes about her first sexual encounter, she immediately deflects by characterizing it as something that never should have happened. When he asks about the worst thing that’s happened to her, she reveals that undergoing an abortion at a young age left her infertile, which led to her and Pierre adopting the girls.

This information, coupled with what Anne reveals in a comparatively tepid sex scene with Pierre about her clandestine teenage adoration for a friend of her mother’s, hints that her sexual awakening was a rude one involving a much older man. “I saw him as a pre-cadaver,” she whispers to Pierre about her old flame, humorously revealing that the object of her affection wasn’t geriatric, but rather thirty-three years old. In the sex scene following Théo’s interview, it’s Anne’s turn to dominate the camera’s gaze: she is pale, with closed eyes and a slightly slack jaw; her panting moans recall a death rattle more than an orgasm. While she has a perfectly taut body, a smattering of youthful freckles and breasts that appear immune to gravity, she, too, embodies a pre-cadaver.

In terms of digression, Last Summer doesn’t herald itself as the first Breillat film to take a staunch moral stance by outwardly decrying a character’s actions. Back in 2018, the filmmaker stated: “Since I’m an artist, I don’t have to be politically correct.” Even cursory fans of Breillat’s work can’t feign shock at this statement, but what she professed just before that sentence was certainly unsavory. “I’m not for #BalanceTonPorc, or for #MeToo for that matter,” she said on an alarmingly frank appearance on a since-deleted episode of the Murmur podcast, where she took aim at Asia Argento’s 2017 allegations against Harvey Weinstein. “I don’t believe Asia … I think she’s a mercenary and a traitor.” Argento fired back by calling Breillat “the most sadistic and downright evil director I’ve ever worked with,” referring to their collaboration on The Last Mistress.

While Breillat’s flippant dismissal of Argento’s claim rings hypocritical for a filmmaker fascinated by the social subjugation of women in a violently patriarchal world, her hesitation to come to the actress’s support became overshadowed when the accuser turned into the accused. A year after she publicly denounced Weinstein, Argento became embroiled in her own scandal when the New York Times ran a piece that accused her of sexually assaulting actor Jimmy Bennett, who was seventeen years old at the time of their encounter (Argento first met Bennett when he was seven). She has fervently denied these claims.

It could be mere coincidence that Last Summer features a woman, likely once a victim herself, who takes advantage of a seventeen-year-old boy while leaning on her own expertise—as a woman and a legal representative of similar cases—to shield herself from facing accountability. As Breillat’s first film since speaking out about these matters, and noting her history of mining from her lived experience, the similarities nonetheless merit addressing.

Even if Last Summer subtly references the allegations against Argento, Breillat never positions Anne as a villain; if anything, Théo is portrayed as a tactless tattle-tale (if appropriately childish), consumed by the need to destroy Anne’s reputation after she breaks things off. “Bitterness, too, can lead people to denounce; if you wanted to obtain something and you didn’t obtain it, if you feel humiliated,” Breillat theorized of Argento’s original accusation against Weinstein. Bitterness, indeed, is a central exploration of the film, which is conversely uninterested in notions of justice—legal, vigilante, or otherwise.

“I’m a feminist, but not in my films,” Breillat elaborates. “Feminism can go too far … but of course rape is a crime, attempted rape is a crime. They must be harshly punished and condemned, and they aren’t always.” Last Summer grapples with the filmmaker’s own ideas of restitution; even if the film is ultimately void of a sound position, it’s nonetheless thrilling, incisive and devastating in its investigation. In this sense, it’s a true return to form by a filmmaker whose singular brand of transgressive (t)horniness has been sorely missed during her decade-long hiatus.