★★★★★
Those expecting Catherine Breillat to scandalise the Croisette this year will find her new film, Last Summer (2023), perhaps disappointing. Given its salacious storyline – a middle-aged lawyer who specialises in child protection cases having an affair with her 17-year-old step-son – one might expect something confrontationally outrageous. But Breillat has instead made a delicate and wholly captivating film instead about, not just abuse of power, but middle-aged sexuality and decades spent being miserable dominated by bourgeois repression. Late in light, she realises she’s a pervert, and finds liberation in such a revelation.
Anne (Léa Drucker) is married to Pierre (Olivier Ramboudin), a businessman being investigated for tax discrepancies. Their lives are ordinary and routine. They work, raise their two adopted children, nothing is out of place, everything is trucking along. Then in walks Theo (Samuel Kircher), Pierre’s eldest from a previous marriage. Expelled from private school, he turns up at their door a floppy-haired pouty brat, a wannabe rebel, a thoroughly unlikeable lad. But soon enough, Anne and he have sex and begin a purely carnal relationship.
With Last Summer, Breillat has directed a subtle masterwork about female sexuality, and middle-aged female sexuality at that. The camera attempts to query sultry Anne’s inner thoughts during sex. These close-ups are astonishing, at once delicate, intimate and sensual, but perhaps also perverse and base … just what is she thinking about? Is she thinking anything at all, or is she lost in some realm where thoughts have given over entirely to emotion and feelings, ones her day-to-day life cannot hope to give her? In focusing so intently on Anne’s face, Breillat is inviting us to take in her pleasure, study her, to accept she has found momentary happiness through boundary-breaking transgression.
It was Nabokov who once wrote what separates sex from the cosmic and the comic is the letter ‘s’ … but Breillat finds provocative truth in the act. Neither cosmic nor comic … just a fascinating human action, dangerous joy. And some critics accused her of playing it safe! Breillat’s honesty has always gotten her into trouble, but now she’s met with indifference? It’s bizarre.
When Theo confesses to his father, Anne becomes defensive and is prepared to battle to protect her bourgeois status. In other words, her privilege and need for self-preservation kicks in. Anne’s summer of sexual abandon hits reality like a car ploughing into a tree. Suddenly, Theo is a threat, his brattish need for attention and quest to disrupt the household repulses Anne, disrupts her inner-revolution, her secret need to exist outside morality.
Brucker is phenomenal in the lead role. Anne hides behind the veneer of bourgeois respectability while wanting to tear down its walls and give in fully to her desires. The film’s handsome look also reflects Anne’s own modus operandi: transgressive qualities masked by deceptively pretty visuals.
If this is Breillat’s final work, she’s gone out on the highest note possible.
Still: Festival de Cannes