LAST SUMMER (Catherine Breillat 2023)

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SAMUEL KIRCHER, LÉA DRUCKER IN LAST SUMMER

CATHERINE BREAILLAT: LAST SUMMER (2023)

A forbidden affair, with a big age difference

How does a 52-year-old woman, Anne (Léa Drucker) get sexually involved with her husband's 17-year-old son Théo (Samuel Kicrher, in his debut, the younger of two sons of Irène Jacob), by an earlier marriage, right in the middle of their home? Mutual attraction, of course, and the point is clearly made: young guys like older women. This is a provocative subject, somehow ideal for veteran French filmmaker Catherine Breillat.

The couple has two little adopted daughters, Anne not being able to bear children. Théo was living with his mother, but gets into trouble, is arrested for assaulting a teacher. Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), his father, Anne's husband, brings him to live with them in their very handsome, spacious suburban house for the summer. Pierre hopes belatedly to become a good influence on the youth. Théo accuses his father of having adopted the girls out of guilt for neglecting him. Théo considers his father a "vieux con," an old fool, an asshole. He tells him so. Pierre reports this to Anne. (Drucker, Kircher, and Rabourdin all deliver admirable and convincing performances.)

Théo is uncooperative and not very polite at first. But he likes playing with the little girls. This puts him close to Anne, for whom he has contempt at first. But he quickly becomes part of the family. He playfully persuades Anne to let him give her a tattoo.

Anne is a lawyer, who deals with ironically related cases, sex, teenagers, bad parenting, custody: a serious, important job. Pierre is involved in business, something corporate and wearying. But they make love, Pierre and Anne, and she tells him, when he presses, that she finds the body of an aging man touching.

The casting of Samuel Kircher is a choice here. He is an "éphèbe," the delicate French young male type, slim, pretty, long-haired, almost like a girl, but very much an attractive guy. He is not so much the handsome, muscular, masculine type, but more a boy-toy. Nor is Théo solid and responsible as a person. He seems to have no sport to play, no books to read, no skill to practice, save being pretty and provocative. And he turns out to be larcenous. In wanting to reshape him Pierre seems clueless. But Théo is ready for love, as soon becomes evident.

One day Anne and Théo are hot and close and start to kiss, and before you know it they're making love. It's natural, physical, erotic, but not romantic, and no erotic passion, no idyll, no Lady Chatterly's Lover affiar. It starts when Pierre is on a two-day business trip.

Anne's best friend is her sister Mina (Clotilde Courau), who is always around. Théo is excited, in lust, maybe in love, and can't leave off snuggling with Anne, embracing her, kissing her at every private moment. And on the edge of one such moment, Mina sees, and knows about them. From then on Anne starts ending the affair and demanding Théo's absolute silence. She insists that they must behave as if it never happened. But it's not so easy for him to turn off. As time goes on it becomes clear that Anne means much, much more to him than his girlfriend, Amanda (Nelia Da Costa). Then, Pierre decides to take some time alone with Théo in their chalet, just the two of them, to get closer. To talk. And talk they do, and furious Pierre becomes.

All this happens in a world of luxury and good taste, in very posh surroundings. Despite his history of trouble, Théo is a bourgeois bad boy, not a delinquent. This is a world halfway between Rohmer and Chabrol, but all Breillat, because this is her kind of situation. This is a sexual chronicle, not a thriller, and there's also very little discussion à la Rohmer: everybody has their mind made up already. Except that after the affair "ends" and the negotiation and the squabbling begin, the physical passion isn't over. Anne tells Théo "You are mad" and he says "You are mad, too...mad about me" and they are mad about each other. Still the family will endure.

In a review of this film the chief New York Times critic Manohla Dargis describes Catherine Breillat as "a longtime provocateur who tests the limits of what the world thinks women should do and say and be." A critic cited on the French film website AlloCiné describes the filmmaker in more general terms, as "a master in the art of distilling trouble, [who] loves transgressing morality more than anything." This is another plot that people find uncomfortable: but while it is provocative, this is smoother and more palatable than Breillat's earlier films: the beautiful, posh setting, the good-looking people. Above all Léa Drucker has the slim blonde Parisian perfection of a French female movie star. This may make everything more palatable for some, but a recent related Times article about Breillat ("A Woman Sleeping With Her Stepson? This Director Knows It May Shock.") says the French cinema world has had little use for her, and she would have had no career were it not for her Anglophone audience. This is, indeed, her first film since Abus de faiblesse a decade ago. But this one's debut in Competition at Cannes suggests her status is pretty secure now.

Breillat is a helpful provocateur with a long career, but she doesn't do nuance. The characters in Last Summer shift rapidly from indifference to love to hate with a rapid edit. They don't converse; they negotiate. Once the affair is over, Breillat and her collaborator Pascal Bonitzer provide ingenious developments, but it seems what mattered was the affair, and to make the point that it is the young man who most wants it and only for itself. The point is made: young guys like older women. Not, after all, such a radical idea. But this is a very modern approach to it in what is acknowledged to be primarily a remake of the multiple prize-winning 2019 Danish film by May el-Toukhy, Queen of Hearts, a film that Peter Bradshaw said had him on the edge of his seat. This French version does that too.

Last Summer/L'Été dernier, 104 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition, May 25, 2023. US debut NYFF Oct. 10, 2023. US limited theatrical release (NYC, LA, San Francisco) Jun. 28, 2024. Screened for this review Jun. 29 2924.