‘Last Summer’ Director Catherine Breillat Doesn’t See The Need For Intimacy Coordinators On Her Sets: “They Have No Science Behind What They’re Doing”

A beautiful, high-powered fiftysomething (Léa Drucker) takes apparent leave of her senses, heeds her own perverse desire, and strikes up a carnal affair with her seventeen-year-old stepson (Samuel Kircher). He came onto her, she knows it’s wrong, and yet she shows a curious lack of remorse as she repeatedly cuckolds her husband (Olivier Rabourdin) under his own roof. Even after she’s found out by her sister, she bypasses every possible off-ramp out of the predicament she’s created for herself, down far too bad for this grateful young hunk to simply turn off what turns her on. Through all the moral rationalization and undulating flesh, the camera rolls without judgement. 

On paper, it sounds like a premise one might place on a spectrum somewhere between late-night Cinemax and BangBros. It sounds like a shameless indulgence of fantasy, a distinctly male notion of mature female libido. At the very least, it sounds like the Frenchest movie ever made, a near-parody of the Gallic principles of liberté, egalité, and infidelité. Through a half-century of studied provocation on screen, however, the legendary directrix Catherine Breillat has earned something like a conceptual benefit of the doubt; she can always be trusted to find the most complex, discomfiting perspective on what would otherwise be fetishistic and tawdry. 2001’s Fat Girl punctuated a frank coming-of-age story with a multiple homicide and child rape, 2004’s Anatomy of Hell cast porn star Rocco Siffredi as a man pounding away his own homosexuality over a paid four-day sex binge with a woman, and now her masterly Last Summer portrays the one May-December fling to rule them all with a mix of sensitivity and mercilessness. 

Through constant denunciation from the French cultural infrastructure, through a stroke that partially paralyzed the left side of her body, Breillat has dauntlessly continued her pursuit of an elusive ideal she says she still has yet to attain. Meeting with Decider at Criterion’s offices in Manhattan, she elucidated her intricate ideas about unruly passions, the counterintuitive yet undeniable urges she strives to comprehend through her hungry, searching, brilliant work. In practice, this meant chatting about step-family porno, hypocritical puritanism, submission, the consent of silence, and the efficacy of intimacy coordinators. (With expert translation services from Assia Turquier-Zauberman.)

DECIDER: You previously portrayed a romance between an older woman and a much younger man in Brief Crossing; coming to Last Summer, did you feel that there were aspects of the subject you still wanted to address, that you’d developed new ideas or just had some unfinished business with the topic of age-gap relationships? 

CATHERINE BREILLAT: It’s different every time, for the fact that every film has its own plot and script, of course, but mostly different bodies. Samuel [Kircher] is not the same teenager, just as Léa [Drucker] is not the same woman. Brief Crossing was a simple script, and this one is more complex. Brief Crossing was supposed to be a miniseries that turned into a film, modeled on Brief Encounter. Age gap is not the subject that I’m interested in, but rather the nuance and detail and emotion of every new situation. I could make this film over and over and over again, and it would be different every time. 

Last Summer is a case in point of how different two films can be, despite their textual similarities, given that this is a remake of the Danish film Queen of Hearts. Some of the dialogue is exactly the same, but these two films are different in every way; sometimes, even saying the same words can have such distant meanings, because it’s mine now. This is how I see life. I didn’t keep any of the moralism, and it was important not to make this about a predatory woman. I was unable to create this trope, which was to me a conventional trope, and I’m more interested in setting up situations that upset the accepted compass of good and evil. 

I’m not a sociologist. I’m not a psychologist. I’m not interested in the question of the age gap. I am an entomologist. I look, and I represent things as they are, as naturally as I can. 

Incest is thought of, by many people, as the ultimate taboo. Tackling it at this late juncture of your career, is there any feeling of wanting to take on this final frontier, in the same way some people want to climb Everest?

Well, first, it’s just “paper incest.” Technical, that is.

Soft incest, sure. 

It is crucial that his desire drives the affair and that she succumbs to it. They barely know each other, and she has very little power or ascendancy over him. Her giving into temptation, that’s what I’m filming, someone giving in. Who could say they could resist in such a situation?

In the film, she cites Article 222, the law against incest in France — which, at the time of filming, would not have considered this affair legally incestuous, but now does. 

I was reminded of a recent film called Cuties, which was the target of much controversy here in the States for depicting juvenile sexuality. Do you find that Americans are more easily scandalized than the French? 

[In English.] Less! 

Really? Pourquoi?

[In French.] I was saved by the Americans when 36 Fillette came out, and I was lapidated by the French press. They wouldn’t have anything to do with me, whereas there was a good reception here, with an invitation to the New York Film Festival. From there, the film was able to travel the world. In many ways, the French are more puritan than the Americans, but they’re more hypocritical about it. 

As much as this dynamic is regarded as forbidden, stepfamily scenarios have nonetheless become widely popular in English-language online pornography. Do you see some core appeal, something universal in spite of or maybe because it’s off-limits?

I have worked with a porn star, but do not watch it myself, so this is not something I know that much about. But I do know that there’s a lot to do with male fantasies here, because I can say from experience — I have a sister, I would know — that it’s very common for men to leave a woman for her sister, or to have an affair with her sister. I would theorize that these projections can be expanded into whole registers. 

I will return to this question of the gap between America and France: it’s actually not quite that the French are more puritanical, the Anglo-Saxons might be more like that, which is to say that they do understand sex in terms of ice and fire. Whereas the French are longing for gauloiserie, a sort of bawdy, specifically French way of speaking about sex. This was very different from mine, and they could not bear the ice and fire of my gaze. Also, they were very misogynist, and I was a woman. So I became the worst filmmaker in France, the “shame of France,” according to one magazine. We have different natures, but as you say, art is universal. So if one country, if one audience, repudiates you, shuns you, your work will later find the people who appreciate it. The only thing one can do is continue telling the truth. We should not be too reliant on the taste of one country or group to know what the fate of a film will be.

In what way would Last Summer be different if the genders were reversed, a stepfather carrying on with his stepdaughter? Would that meaningfully, integrally alter the film?

There is no need to make such a film, because we know this topic already, it is everywhere. This story has been told.

In such delicate scenes, intimacy coordinators have become a common part of the process. What role do you see them playing on your set?

What diploma? What science? The intimacy coordinators are self-appointed, and have no science behind what they’re doing. They import a language and philosophy that isn’t about intimacy, because intimacy isn’t only about the physical. To coordinate by looking purely at the bodies onscreen is bad storytelling, which brings about a moralistic imposition on actors who are artists, and mustn’t be faced with more obstacles between themselves. This is an erroneous language. What I do with actors is describe and negotiate, find what each performer feels comfortable with in a way that isn’t able to be standardized, normalized into a grid. On Anatomy of Hell, for example, our actress said she did not want to sleep with [star Rocco] Siffredi, whereas for me this seemed less daring than the scene with the tampon, which was beautiful and easy to film for her. For me, I was more reserved about it. These scenes work because, together, we confront our fears. The actor’s fears and my own fears. 

The intimacy coordinators’ philosophy, which is that actors must be protected from directors because directors are pigs, may be true of some people. But those directors that would require the presence of an intimacy coordinator, if they can’t handle those scenes, they shouldn’t be doing them at all. Not every film needs to have a sex scene. 

The gesticulation that intimacy coordinators work in is very far from the craft of what I do when I create my sex scenes: one long shot, because I like to find the emotion in a single take worked out with my body, even though I now move with difficulty. Everything on Last Summer, I first did with my own body. Then, my first AD would step in and stand in for the man. My sound engineer would then stand in for the woman while I looked behind the camera and the monitors. Then we’d call the actors, and Léa might say she’s ready to go, but first they must learn this precise choreography. The scene where Samuel is between her legs, we didn’t know how we were going to do it, because there were mirrors and a counter-shot and we wanted to do it in such a way to show her legs and not her breasts, but that image became vulgar instead of purely graphic. This is a distinction that a coordinator without any credentials cannot possibly take into account.

In terms of the technical aspect, i was cutting and scotch-taping underwear long before there was a whole pret-a-porter of protections. That scene between her legs, I regret not using my old methods. It would’ve looked better. And again, the people who can’t handle the responsibilities of these scenes should be be trying at all. Beautiful films get by without sex; Grace Kelly only needs a kiss on the cheek. Not everyone is suited to sex. 

I was telling Léa, who’d never done an intimate scene of this kind before, that I have less interest in bodies than the nudity of the face. And I told her, don’t be mistaken, there’s much more intimacy in allowing the camera in close-up on your bare face. That’s what cinema is trying to get at, in the end. All I film is intimacy, and it’s all on the face.

Reading your interviews in preparation for this conversation, I’ve seen you spend so much time explicating your theories of sex, on top of the time in your career you’ve spent considering sex through the work itself. Has this made you analytical in your own experiences? Have you ever found yourself directing a partner, or yourself?

 [Laughs.] It’s the other way around! On the contrary, I’m quiet and reserved. To me, consent is a matter of silence. It’s always a question of how someone goes from being a dressed person to an undressed person. There’s something absurd and fascinating about that, the surprise of it. The only moment that words come in, as far as I’m concerned, is when someone wants to say no. Going past that, of course you are in the territory of assault and rape. But for me, the unwrapping of the sexual act as a surprise is what excites me in life. You can’t consent on paper prior, to the degree that that would make sex impossible. And what’s interesting is how one is suddenly able, in the most natural way, to do the impossible. And the consent which is silent is not entirely silent, there is a whole language humans have access to for this. The language in our eyes, in the muscles of our face. We do not necessarily have a map for this as people, but as a filmmaker, this is precisely what I am showing. The contradiction of someone saying no and mean yes — we’re the only species capable of this. Animals are in heat, and they procreate. The human animal has a relationship to the rewards of pleasure, first modestly, and then suddenly through this portal of sentiment and feeling muddled in, the communion with the other becomes something else, what I call ‘the transparent body.’ An absolute love that comes through the physical body. This is what I have always wanted to show with my cinema, but I haven’t yet.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.