‘Last Summer’ Review: Catherine Breillat’s Sobering Anatomy of a Forbidden Affair

If cinema often attempts to stoke our erotic fantasies with soft lighting and rehearsed movements that have little to do with sex as many of us experience it, Catherine Breillat’s films serve as a counterpoint. The French filmmaker and novelist is less concerned with eroticism than with the power that sex represents, and her most intimate scenes are often so unpleasurable as to be as unrealistic in their own way as conventionally arousing sequences. Watching movie sex that isn’t meant to be a turn-on can push one to contemplate what else is going on between the people in the frame. And in Last Summer, her remake of the 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts, Breillat brings her icy, unwaveringly sober sensibilities to one of the most common of American pop cultural sex fantasies: a teenager’s tryst with a MILF.

Perhaps only Breillat would open a film about an affair between a middle-aged woman and her teenaged stepson—a premise that might sound horny and nostalgic, with shades of Summer of ’42 or The Graduate or My Tutor or American Pie—with a wrenching testimony of the effects of rape. Anne (Léa Drucker) is an attorney who advocates for victims of sexual abuse, and we first see her talking to a teenage girl about how her assailant’s defense team will paint her as promiscuous and unreliable. It’s an old trick, but the girl is discovering these truths for the first time—the weight of the embarrassment that’s to follow her violation coming to rest on her shoulders. Her vulnerability and disappointment cast a pall over Last Summer, as does Anne’s facility with manipulating the law. A matter of circumstance might be what separates Anne from the girl, or Anne from this girl’s violator, or, implicitly, anyone from anyone else.

Breillat takes her time setting up her chess pieces. Last Summer somehow feels tight, open and leisurely, and cloaked in dread all at once. At their home in the suburbs of Paris, we see Anne with her older husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), who’s successful but scans as dull and schlubby when compared to his trim and attractive wife. If we know Last Summer’s narrative ahead of time, we may feel as if an equation is being established that’s typical of older-woman, younger-man sex fantasies: that a boring husband gives a wife license to get her groove back elsewhere. But Breillat doesn’t settle for such simplifications. The filmmaker and actors allow the audience to feel the tedium and comfort of a relationship running on autopilot.

Early in the film, Anne and Pierre are decompressing in their bedroom. They have missionary sex and the camera invites us to contemplate the mysteries of Anne’s face—an image that will be repeated, and reversed, several times in the film. She appears to be experiencing various passing sensations: boredom and perhaps pity for Pierre and even herself, as well as qualified contentment with sex that she and Pierre have probably had weekly for years.

The ambiguities of Anne’s emotions keep us off balance, as if we’re having sex ourselves and trying to read our partners. As a preamble to this encounter, Anne describes a moment in her life as a teenager when she was attracted to an older man, imagining his physical deterioration as a turn-on. Anne is describing the fear, morbidity, and excitement that can drive May-December relationships. How might this person further along on life’s sliding scale be to touch and experience and learn from? The film acknowledges that there’s a disconcertingly thin line between love and hate, and revulsion and attraction and boredom and comfort and all of the accumulated baggage that everyone brings into bed with them.

Enter Théo (Samuel Kircher), Pierre’s 17-year-old son from a prior marriage, in every fashion a contrast from his old man. Théo is thin and young and impulsive as well as, in the tradition of many teenagers, a pain in the ass. Staying with Pierre and Anne and their two young adopted daughters, Théo stages a series of resentful rebellions, which Pierre greets with poignant cluelessness. Anne becomes a conspirator with the boy, opening a gate to a vaster indiscretion.

Anne and Pierre’s gradual bonding is among Breillat’s finest hours as a filmmaker. Breillat mounts a docudrama of how people hook-up on a subliminal physical level. As Theo and Anne drink in a bar together, Breillat lingers on a series of close-ups of Théo’s face as he leans in toward Anne, smitten with her in the manner of a child, and intoxicated with the possibilities of the moment. In another scene, we’re allowed to feel as if we’re noticing for ourselves how Théo gently grasps Anne’s under arm. Last Summer has dozens of such moments, which render the situation real, rather than marring it in the harlequin clichés a daydream. The reality of these moments is compacted by Breillat’s committed and very pointed objectivity. No one is sentimentalized, and Breillat denies neither the ickiness of this affair nor its potential pull.

Breillat invests every moment with fraught specificity. No scene is merely a preamble toward sex, as the preambles themselves and their motherlode of baggage are the true subjects of Last Summer. Boldly, Breillat doesn’t visually code Anne’s sex with Théo as being more exciting than it is with Pierre. In fact, she barely differentiates the sex at all. Everyone here favors the missionary position, with Anne passively receiving the man’s exertions, her face suggesting a deep desire for submission. If you’re an audience member, especially one entering this fantasy from Théo’s point of view, you may find what happens on screen rather wanting. But, again, Breillat is less concerned with the screwing than the people and positions they occupy.

For instance, the film refuses to shy away from the fact that Théo is a boy. The context of that cute babyface kissing or going down on an adult woman, in the film’s one break from sexual routine, is unavoidably creepy. Kircher gives a remarkable performance, creating a recognizably real teenager, which is rare in a medium that strives to make them sassier and nobler than experience suggests. Théo’s easy to dislike, but it would be short-sighted to deny the poignancy of his situation: He’s entitled, and selfish, yet feels adrift between his parents. Anne gives him something that he thinks he wants yet can’t handle. Once again, he’s a boy.

Breillat refuses to judge Anne as well, dramatizing step by step how someone can lose control. In modern culture, there’s something subversive about making an attractive and well-healed woman into the one who abuses power for sexual gratification. Wouldn’t it be easier to digest if a man was in the wrong? For this discomfort, Last Summer might rub certain people, those who prefer that their morals and politics go unchallenged, the wrong way. None of that fazes Breillat, who understands that what we want and what we should want can be pitted in stark contention, forcing people to take rapid accounting of elements of themselves that were previously unknown. Breillat looks a nest of taboos straight in the face and says “that’s life.”