Catherine Breillat’s taboo French drama Last Summer is an inconsistent cautionary tale

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• Last Summer
• Directed by Catherine Breillat
• Written by Catherine Breillat and Pascal Bonitzer
• Starring Léa Drucker, Olivier Rabourdin and Samuel Kircher
• Classification N/A; 104 minutes
• Opens in select theatres including the TIFF Lightbox on July 5

Last Summer, the latest effort from French filmmaker Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl, Anatomy of Hell), opens with a teenage girl receiving legal counsel after being sexually assaulted, telling her lawyer through tears the number of people she slept with that year.

“In court, the victims often become the accused,” her lawyer Anne (Léa Drucker) explains. Anne is somewhat impatient, though not stony; she clearly has a wealth of experience in such lawsuits, and her probing serves to prepare her client for the worst, or rather, the inevitable.

The French-language film follows Anne, her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), and their two adopted daughters, as Pierre’s troubled teenage son from a previous marriage, Théo (Samuel Kircher), comes to live with them. Théo’s antics (arrests, altercations, suspensions) go largely unnoticed by Pierre, a non-descript businessman seldom seen at home. When Anne catches Théo staging a robbery of their home and chooses not to tell his father, the two form a strange bond that culminates in an affair, threatening Anne’s family and career, and Théo’s well-being.

The film is a remake of May el-Toukhy’s 2019 Danish drama Queen of Hearts, featuring a nearly identical script up until the ending – an extreme divergence. Producer Saïd Ben Saïd bought the rights to the Danish film and sent Breillat a note saying he wished to produce a remake and believed she could do a better job than the original. One can lodge the complaint that Last Summer is redundant, though Breillat’s aims differ significantly from el-Toukhy’s. The trouble lies instead with the inconsistency and loathsomeness of these aims.

In an early sex scene between Anne and Pierre, she recounts, bizarrely, that at 17, she was attracted to a 33-year-old man, stating that she is a gerontophile, and prefers “a body that’s lived, that’s lost the firmness of youth.”

She repeatedly separates herself from the chaff – “Normopaths bore me,” she tells Pierre – which might clarify why she pines after a thorny, tattooed juvenile. There is a cleft in Breillat’s misdirection here: Is Anne suppressing her own attitudes toward aging, becoming the object of her forlorn gerontophilia? Is she unsatisfied and slipping into the abusive character she habitually prosecutes? Perhaps she’s seeking dominance over motherhood, her marriage, her unruly stepson?

As Breillat told online streamer MUBI, she did not like the original film’s portrayal of Anne as a predator and is unconvinced that Anne and Théo’s relationship was, in fact, abusive. “She sides with him, she creates a link of complicity between the two of them, but it isn’t to manipulate him or abuse him. It’s rather to support him and to help him, this teenager who’s obviously in distress,” she says. “What happens between them is almost innocent and certainly unpremeditated.”

It is unsurprising that Breillat – who has repeatedly voiced her discontent for the #MeToo movement and spoken in favour of Harvey Weinstein – would examine this story through the lens of first-degree murder. The notion that the spontaneous, “unpremeditated” quality of Anne’s affection should absolve her does little to serve Drucker’s layered performance, where she plays Anne on a spectrum from thoughtless and enthralled to frigid and vindictive. In one scene, we can see her face feeling through the betrayal of being found out and ultimately settling into violent denial.

Kircher also plays Théo as vulnerable and unsuspecting, a child gradually coming to realize that his desire conceals ugly consequences. The throbbing quality of this affair is largely refracted off of Anne’s daughters, whom she stands to lose if her violations come to light, and who Théo is shown to lovingly care for – the heartbreak is twofold, between their own immoral relationship and their untainted affection for their family.

There is nothing innocent about Anne, an attorney sought after to prosecute sexual assault, instigating a sexual relationship with her 17-year-old stepson (played by 17-year-old Kircher – hence the lack of full-frontal nudity, uncharacteristic of Breillat). The actors seem to know this, whether or not their director agrees. Last Summer, then, is functional as a cautionary text against abuse, if only incidentally.

Special to The Globe and Mail