I wouldn’t know for sure, but I imagine it hurts more to be stabbed with a dull butter knife than a sharp blade. The obtuseness of the thing makes its impact that much sharper, metaphorically speaking—an assertion that holds true for French provocateur Catherine Breillat’s latest film, her first in ten years.
Last Summer is seemingly her most accessible work to date. Her general filmography is among the most transgressive cinema made nowadays and often deals explicitly with problematic age gaps between lovers. It’s technically a remake of May el-Toukhy’s 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts (though Breillat makes it an altogether different text) and centers on a middle-aged woman who begins an affair with her teenage stepson. The woman, Anne (Léa Drucker), is a lawyer specializing in helping victims of sexual abuse and navigating tricky custody arrangements. She’s married to an affluent middle-aged man with whom she has two adopted daughters. Not only does her life seem idyllic, but she also seems to be a good person overall. This makes the affair with her underage stepson all the more shocking, especially contrasted with the film’s ostensibly middlebrow aesthetic, appearing, as it does, like more generic French art house fare, just as Anne seems to be a generic middle-class woman. What’s truly provocative, though, isn’t the situation itself but how it’s posited, less dogmatic about who’s the seducer and who might be a victim, and how it’s finally handled by Anne.
As is her wont, Breillat doesn’t pander to today’s overly prudent mores toward sexuality. If anything, her film is all the more shocking precisely because it isn’t necessarily supposed to be. The dull stabbing of such unseemliness is something more subtly trenchant than a cutting examination of midlife and suburban contentment, yet it’s also truer as a result. Breillat gets at more than just the complexities of life and desire, but also the complexity of filmmaking—and viewing—itself. 104 min.
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