The hottest movie of the season is also the most uncomfortable. Last summerwhich hits theaters on July 28, is the first film in a decade from provocative French director Catherine Breillat. Last summerShe adapts the 2019 Danish film queen of hearts with a suspenseful sensuality that is difficult to shake off. The story of a quasi-incestuous romance from May to December that threatens to destroy a wealthy family, it is a drama expertly modulated to raise eyebrows and pulses, led by a superb performance from Léa Drucker which is rooted in passions uncontrollable self-destructive behavior and intense instincts for self-preservation.
Last summer finds Anne (Drucker) calling out a teenage girl on her drinking one night, as well as her carnal proclivities with boys. While it initially seems like a mother-daughter scolding, it gradually reveals itself to be a lawyer-client back-and-forth; Anne is a lawyer specializing in counseling children at risk. Her own adopted Asian daughters, Serena (Serena Hu) and Angela (Angela Chen), are far more stable than the children she works with, and her home life with them and her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) is luxurious and happy.
But everything changes when Pierre receives a call from his ex-wife telling him that his 17-year-old son Théo (Samuel Kircher) has gotten into trouble at school again. In response, Théo comes to live with Anne and Pierre, despite the boy being bitterly estranged from his father, who has been MIA during his upbringing.
Upon arrival, Theo lives up to his status as a pain in the ass, leaving his clothes strewn all over the house for Anne to collect, bristling at his elders and worrying more about wasting time on the phone and smoking inside. than obeying the rules or being productive.
From the beginning, Last summer The film presents parenthood as a form of quasi-war, not only between adults and children, but also between ex-spouses, as highlighted by Anne’s sister, Mina (Clotilde Courau), who is angry with her ex- brother who dropped their son off unexpectedly at his workplace. These tensions between men and women and between families are omnipresent, so much so that even a judo match between Théo and one of his teenage sisters (“I strangle all the boys,” she says, pinning him to the bed ) contributes to the pervasive atmosphere of hostility.
If antagonism boils beneath its placid surface, Last summer is simultaneously energized by a tension of subtle sexual electricity. Whether it’s a quick glimpse of Anne tugging a shirt over her bra, or recurring shots of the characters’ feet (with and without shoes), sensuality permeates throughout these events, setting the stage for the mayhem to come.
From a screenplay co-written by Pascal Bonitzer, Breillat evokes the interaction between his two main concerns, parenthood and sex, in a scene where Pierre slowly undresses then climbs on top of Anne while explaining that Théo is “nasty as hell”. ‘hell “. The following anecdote in the middle of Anne’s love affair about having a crush on an older man at 14, whose “parchment-thin skin” both disgusted and fascinated her, adds an additional age-related element to this tense mix.
Anne claims to be a “gerontophile” and that “normopaths” bore her, but her subsequent actions indicate that only one of these claims is actually true. Abandoning a dinner date to go for a walk and a drink with Théo at a local café, Anne is clearly seduced by the way the floppy-haired, often shirtless boy tilts his head and looks at her with a playful, come-hither desire. When, later, she joins him on his bed to watch the animated film he’s been watching on his phone, they kiss. Sex follows, with Breillat’s camera zooming in on Anne’s ecstatic face, her eyes closed.
It’s a mistake, and Anne knows it. Nevertheless, their affair continues, with her confessing secrets to him on an audiotape about her past abortion (which is why she’s sterile and adopted Serena and Angela). It’s only after they’re caught by someone close to her that Anne has a moment of clarity and tries to stop things before they really explode. Yet, as she soon learns, taming the heart (and the libido) is easier said than done.
In a private conversation, Anne confesses to Theo that her greatest fear is not just that everything will disappear, but that she could make everything disappear, because the only thing worse than a calamity is the anticipation that precedes it . This impulse is at the origin of Anne’s compulsion, and yet Last summer offers no easy answers regarding its protagonist, who reacts when she is discovered by cleverly manipulating the truth and her thorny domestic circumstances to her advantage.
The film vibrates with erotic desire and fear of discovery, a fear so intense that, as Anne believes, it’s almost a relief to have nothing and nowhere to hide. Except there’s always something worth hiding, and Anne ultimately finds herself caught between setting her life on fire and putting out the flames.
Last summer doesn’t care about condemnation; it focuses on the capricious impulses that drive Anne forward in the face of obvious catastrophic consequences, and Drucker sells her plight with a firmness peppered with layers of arrogance, hypocrisy, and recklessness.
In various close-ups, Drucker shifts abruptly from confidence to caution to unbridled recklessness and back again, and her poise and precision are key to the film’s intriguing dynamics. Even more than Theo, whose behavior is grounded in a more immature desire for compassion and revenge, she is a figure torn by competing instincts and interests, and Drucker evokes her contradictions with a thoroughness that sustains the material.
What is ultimately most exciting in Last summer is that it refuses to indulge in comforting tsk-tsk moralizing about its characters, whose conduct – whether foolish, selfish, reprehensible and/or mean-spirited – can speak for itself, all of which then which they quickly turn towards a figurative escape from their own construction. A decade removed from cinema, Breillat remains a masterful artist with a keen sense of human hungers, cruelties and crises, and she orchestrates her latest with patience and insight. A gripping portrait of irrepressible forces and reckless choices, it’s proof that the 75-year-old author has been gone too long.
Gn entert
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