Director: Catherine Breillat
Writer: Catherine Breillat
Stars: Lea Drucker, Olivier Raboudin, Samuel Kircher
Synopsis: Follows Anne, a brilliant lawyer who lives with her husband Pierre and their daughters. Anne gradually engages in a passionate relationship with Theo, Pierre’s son from a previous marriage, putting her career and family life in danger.
With Last Summer, Catherine Breillat has made her return to filmmaking after a decade. The auteur filmmaker has been away from cinema for a while, but one thing is apparent: the provocative nature of her films has not lessened during this hiatus. With her latest, Breillat confronts her audience with a taboo subject, but is also able to interject a palpable sense of youthfulness and beauty into a story that will have many doing all they can to block the on-screen images from their minds. The film is centered around Anne (Léa Drucker) and Pierre (Olivier Raboudin), and the seemingly calm and affluent life they live with their young daughters. Her stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher), moves into their home after getting in trouble at school, and the lens of the film immediately shifts. Breillat composes nearly every frame with Anne firmly rooted in the center of it all. In the hands of Drucker, this performance soars into a realm of intrigue. It forces the audience to grapple with why exactly Anne would choose to throw a brick through the glass house so perfectly crafted by herself. Pushing her audience further than that, Breillat seems to be prodding us with a different question: why not? And what happens after it’s shattered? I’m talking, of course, about the relationship this stepmother and stepson develop.
In a smart move, Breillat does not abuse a “will they/won’t they” approach to the moral dilemma of Last Summer. On the contrary, she rather quickly tosses her lead character, and subsequently the audience, into a trial by fire. It’s a fitting notion, considering that Anne is a lawyer. The film opens mid-conversation between Anne and an underage client who appears to be going to court after being sexually assaulted. With a very pragmatic approach, Anne describes what’s likely to happen. In the courtroom, her client will be inappropriately labeled and her trauma will be belittled. Anne makes the keen observation that victims are usually the ones that end up the accused. Within her very blunt statements on how the court case will play out, Anne is shown to be very matter-of-fact, as well as having an innate understanding of the difference between right and wrong. Her relationship with her husband is one that they have clearly settled into for quite some time. Both are clearly operating on very busy timetables, so the little time they get with one another is rather muted, almost on the verge of pure pragmatism. The barest of pleasantries are shown, but it doesn’t appear that there’s a wall between the two. Anne reminds Pierre she loves a body that is “lived in”, and proceeds to tell a story from her youth during blatantly hollow sex. Enter Théo, who Breillat quickly uses as her manipulative thematic vessel with a massive grin. The complexities of Anne as a character are now absolutely blown open, as the morals and ideologies we have seen from her thus far are thrown to the wayside in favor of reprehensible actions and a complete surrender to both our deepest emotions and basest desires.
So much of Last Summer hinges on all parties involved nailing a precarious balancing act. While it would be easy for Breillat to turn audiences against the film and its characters almost immediately, she takes a far more interesting approach. Instead, she forces us to witness all these acts and grapple with the choices made, and the emotions fueling them. A fine set of performances are necessary for something like this; luckily the film has them in spades. Drucker is deeply captivating in a particularly dual-wielded approach. On one hand, Anne desperately tries to balance all that she has willingly thrown herself into. Even so, half of her performance convincingly captures pure self-destruction in a mostly believable way. At one point, Anne reveals her biggest fear; it’s not losing everything, but rather, making everything disappear for no clear reason. The other half of Drucker’s magnificent performance, and it’s what makes the third act so electric, is how she handles Anne’s self-preservation. A single line of dialogue, in perhaps the most climactic scene in the film, feels as if Breillat is directly addressing her viewers through Anne. Drucker delivers it with such a soothing venom that I was unable to contain myself in my seat. There’s also Kircher’s debut performance, which accurately captures just how annoying an entitled 17-year-old can be. His nihilistic attitude and lackadaisical approach to life is both relatable, but also wholly annoying for anybody looking back on that age. It’s when the two performers are brought together that the magic occurs. We witness Drucker’s guard coming down in real time, and it’s difficult to tell if she knows it’s occurring or not. It’s a part of her character that she keeps hidden, as we all have assuredly done when realizing a crush is developing.
Even when the act Théo puts on runs dry, there’s a wit about his character that’s played pitch perfect. One scene early on shows Anne looking at Théo as he breaks down his thoughts on relationships. It’s something that any rational person would be put off by, yet Breillat cuts to Anne, and we remember this is not a rational relationship or a rational film. Anne’s eyes are engrossed and deeply attentive, hanging on every word out of the boy’s mouth. When discussing the film, Breillat emphasized how she felt there had to be stakes beyond the macro-conflict. Thus, she partly depicts this relationship through the frenzied lens of spontaneous teenage love. Last Summer is a cinematic minefield waiting to detonate, and any scene with supporting characters nearby has us wincing at the thought of the two being discovered. The fact that Breillat is able to convincingly walk this tightrope for 100 minutes is proof of undeniable talent.
Even so, one might hope for a bit more characterization regarding Anne and why she makes the decisions shown. The notion of depicting teenage love is an interesting one, and self-destructive behavior in film is inherently enticing to watch. Still, Drucker is doing an immense amount of lifting in making this relationship feel as genuine as it could be all things considered, and the script providing some support could be helpful in bringing that third act home in a mightier way. That’s not to say that the ending of this film isn’t deeply shocking; its final image is fascinatingly haunting, but with such a strong third act choice being made by Breillat, more avenues being explored would bring forth even more of an impact. Yet with Last Summer, Breillat, after four decades of filmmaking, proves that a compelling secret being withheld is always a lively cinematic experience; even if the lie in this case is meant to repulse and shock us on some level.
