Pyramid International
Still pushing boundaries at the age of 74, French filmmaker Catherine Breillat returns to the Cannes competition with a film that clearly confronts the only taboo still barred from liberal tolerance: sex between adults and children. In the past she has worked with porn stars, was one of the first to show an erection in an art house film and earned the nickname “porno auteurist”.
Last Summer is less graphic, but just as disturbing – not only because of the fact that an early middle-aged woman has an explosive affair with her teenage stepson, but also because of the way Breillat depicts a middle-class family that breaks up and covering up the cracks with lies, and finally repairing itself, using the ointments of silence and hypocrisy to ensure that nothing unpleasant comes to light and nothing changes. A highly politically charged film, even if it’s mainly about a woman and a boy having sex behind the wooden shed.
It should be said that slim Theo (Samuel Kircher) is not a child except in the legal sense, although we never learn his exact age. Hanging around his father’s house smoking, getting drunk in bars and bringing girls home for sex, he’s managed to commit a whole host of adult vices. But he’s also not what anyone imagines an adult to be. Theo is just lounging because he got suspended from school for hitting a teacher. It is not clear why he is not with his mother and not with his father, whom he has seen only occasionally since early childhood, but there is no question that he can live independently. He’s too young to do anything more distressing than picking up his socks. In fact, he can’t even do that. He also misses social cues, speaks out of line, and is just plain annoying in a very youthful way.
As he falls in love with his stepmother Anne (Lea Drucker, who delivers a wonderful performance in which she convincingly switches back and forth between her character’s multiple personalities) back and forth, he pursues her, with a child’s determination, his will enforce. Inevitably, the steam of passion rises. The summer is hot: the garden of her country house is lush green and there are opportunities around every corner. All Theo has to do is suggest that Anne come over and check out that super cool video game he’s playing on his phone – not exactly Anne’s thing – and she’ll jump on the excuse of snuggling on his bed. It’s not directly about incest, although Breillat certainly breaks that barrier as well. But it’s wrong in every way.
Anne reveals not only her marriage to Theo’s father, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), but also her self-image. She is a family lawyer and a children’s advocate. She is strict with her clients and tightly controls her own life. She keeps a smooth household in which even breakfast offers an opportunity for elegance. She spends her evenings commenting on child protection agency reports. During the day she wears tasteful linen shirts with matching high heels, even in the garden. Often enough it matches her own furniture: a tasteful symphony of cream and beige. She and Pierre adopted two little Asian girls; She takes them to the local stables to ride ponies. She wears full riding gear and half-sized riding crops. Theo is a villain element in all of this, but the little girls love him. And as it turns out, so does her mother.
Breillat shows her pleasure, which is clearly genital, mostly through their faces. The first time, she focuses on Theo, who is staring intently at Anne, his breath caught and joyful at his ultimate release. Next time we will stay at Anne’s. Her eyes are closed, her throat is constricted. She goes into ecstasy at not noticing the lovely nightcap sex she’s having with her husband. These sequences are far more uncomfortable to watch than a tangle of legs arranged by an intimacy coordinator; They are also much longer than current convention dictates. Breillat is a cavalier with details of the plot or their predicament; A court case that threatens to ruin Anne’s career passes and is somehow resolved entirely backstage. Where she never skimps are the encounters between Anne and Theo.
The sheer power of that focus makes Anne’s subsequent denial not only of Theo himself, but of the truth of events, once the threat of exposure threatens, all the more devastating. Hearing a child rights lawyer tell a young person that no one will believe his word unlike hers — the kind of humiliating dismissal she fights every day on behalf of her clients — makes us gasp.
Is that really the abandoned lover of the previous scenes who laughed at nothing for sheer joy and risked everything? And yet, at the same moment, their mendacity sounds perfectly true. The same goes for their cruelty. She has to protect too much.
Catherine Breillat certainly hasn’t shirked her vocation to stun the bourgeoisie, but it would be a mistake to regard her merely as a cinematic shock figure who values effect over substance. Outrage is their weapon. In Last Summer every shot finds its target.
Title: Last Summer (L’Eté Dernier)
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Director-Screenwriter: Catherine Breillat
Pour: Lea Drucker, Samuel Kircher, Olivier Rabourdin, Clotilde Courau
Duration: 1 hour 44 minutes
Sales agent: Pyramid International