Melissa Anderson
Passion and pretense: Catherine Breillat’s latest film presents a complex portrait of a woman divided against herself.
Samuel Kircher as Théo and Léa Drucker as Anne in Last Summer. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
Last Summer, directed by Catherine Breillat, now playing in theaters in New York City and Los Angeles
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Since she began making films nearly fifty years ago, Catherine Breillat has steadfastly scrutinized heterosexual female desire: how it revitalizes, how it deranges, how it makes whole, how it sunders. Her explorations of this volatile theme have varied widely in tenor and tone, from the provocative, Sadean excesses of Romance (1999) and Anatomy of Hell (2004) to the gentler depictions of sexual coupling and curiosity evident in Brief Crossing (2001) and her adaptations of two Charles Perrault fairy tales, Bluebeard (2009) and The Sleeping Beauty (2010). Breillat’s latest, Last Summer, falls somewhere in between. (The film is a remake of the 2019 Danish feature Queen of Hearts, which I haven’t seen.) The sex scenes, focusing less on bodies than on faces, are both explicit and tender. What jolts is the incongruity between the two who are fucking: middle-aged lawyer Anne (Léa Drucker) and her seventeen-year-old stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher). As ever with Breillat, she abjures moralizing or casting judgment on this illicit pair. Instead she reveals, with great acuity, the welter of contradictions and complexities that make Anne, brought to vivid life by Drucker, one of the most fascinating protagonists in her body of work.
Léa Drucker as Anne in Last Summer. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
Last Summer opens with Anne staring solemnly ahead, backlit as if enhaloed. She is an angel of sorts, representing in court underage girls who have been sexually assaulted. The focus of her hard glare is one such client, who must endure Anne’s pitiless questions about the teen’s promiscuity, facts that will help the attorney better deflect the defense’s charges: “In court, victims often become the accused,” she tells the trembling girl.
In stark contrast with the grim realities of her workplace, Anne’s domestic life appears idyllic. She and her slightly older husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), a business executive, live with their two adopted grade-schooler daughters, Angela (Angela Chen) and Serena (Serena Hu), in an elegant house in one of Paris’s affluent, bucolic suburbs. The spouses still share an erotic spark; their children, cheerful and well-behaved, are a constant source of delight. Anne’s sister, Mina (Clotilde Courau), whom she considers her best friend, lives close by. Lounging at home in a sheath dress, a glass of white wine always in her hand, Anne, at least at first, seems utterly content with her haut-bourgeois existence.
Léa Drucker as Anne, Olivier Rabourdin as Pierre, and Samuel Kircher (background) as Théo in Last Summer. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
The serenity of the ménage is upended by the arrival of Théo, Pierre’s son from an earlier marriage. The boy, a Genevan, was recently arrested for punching a teacher, and his mother has decided it’s time for his father to take care of the surly youth. Although Théo is patient and loving with Angela and Serena, reveling in the role of big brother, he is aloof and full of disdain for his dad and stepmother. When Anne promises not to tell Pierre about one of Théo’s more appalling deeds in exchange for the teen’s agreement to behave more “like part of the family,” their dynamic shifts, their collusion a precursor to the more unambiguous intimacies—and more explosive confidences—they will soon share. (Their pact brings to mind a line from Annie Ernaux’s 2001 Getting Lost, her diary detailing her affair with a younger, married Soviet diplomat: “There is an inexhaustible charm to secrecy.”)
Samuel Kircher as Théo and Léa Drucker as Anne in Last Summer. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
Anne and Théo first have sex in his bedroom, while Pierre is away on a work trip. The act is filmed as a static shot, lasting about ninety seconds, shown entirely from supine Anne’s point of view. While his ecstasy is visible, the duet of grunts and gasps leaves no uncertainty about her pleasure. The next sex scene, longer in duration, includes both of their heads in the frame. But the camera soon moves in closer to focus on Anne’s face (her eyes are closed) and arched neck in the moments before she softly comes, then lingers on her visage in her post-orgasmic bliss.
Samuel Kircher as Théo and Léa Drucker as Anne in Last Summer. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
These unconventionally shot segments, by emphasizing the face of each lover at the point of la petite mort, underscore their shared vulnerability. But they also keenly demonstrate that this passion, however misguided, is genuine and inextinguishable. Continuing Breillat’s tradition of unerringly cast films, Last Summer, not for the first time in her oeuvre, pairs a newcomer with a veteran to spectacular results. With his mix of physical attributes both hard (a taut, lean frame) and soft (pillowy lips, a mop of russet curls), first-time performer Kircher exudes a rakish sexual swagger tempered by puppyish solicitude. Drucker, who caught my attention a few years ago with her nuanced portrayals of mothers in Axelle Ropert’s Petite Solange (2021) and Lukas Dhont’s Close (2022), excels here at conveying both unguarded need and calculating arrogance, Anne certain of her lawyerly ability to manipulate any narrative in her favor.
Samuel Kircher as Théo and Léa Drucker as Anne in Last Summer. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
After Pierre inevitably finds out about the affair—Théo tells him—Anne vehemently denies it, snarling at her spouse with icy spite, “You believe tall tales from a kid you barely know.” As delusionally committed as she is to maintaining the sanctity of the respectable family, he all too readily buys her story. Théo, rejected, heartbroken, and out for revenge, threatens to report her unless she admits the truth to Pierre; the response of the woman who advocates for minors is gravid with sick irony: “Nobody will believe you. You’re not credible.”
Léa Drucker as Anne in Last Summer. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
Anne’s poor judgment and extreme dissembling (which Pierre tacitly condones) continue to the very end. The schism between her professional and personal lives recalls a similar split that overtakes the central character in Breillat’s prior movie, the semi-autobiographical Abuse of Weakness (2013), which recounts the director’s involvement with a notorious con man following her stroke in 2004. In that film’s final scene, the Breillat surrogate, named Maud (played by Isabelle Huppert), tries to explain what happened to her assembled family members, aghast at how much money she’s lost. “It was me, but it wasn’t me,” Maud says of the divided self that allowed enormous funds to be drained from her accounts. “I knew I had to stop, but I didn’t care. I must have done it, since I did it.” Likewise, Anne disavows, if more heatedly, her disastrous choices. I knew I had to stop: Anne knows that, too, but doesn’t or can’t or won’t—desire both distorting and reviving her.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press.