Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer walks in stride with her preceding cinematic reputation, albeit perhaps with slightly gentler steps. Last Summer is not as fantastical or explicit as works like her Romance, nor is it as jarring and unflinching as Fat Girl, but it nonetheless feels as if it is in conversation with both cultural accusations of sexless cinema and our perennial “age gap discourse” without ever doing our thinking for us.
Anne (Léa Drucker) lives an organized and comfortable life. She works as a lawyer, mainly, it seems, for young women who have been assaulted and victimized. She has two young adopted twin daughters, and she is affectionately and happily married. Anne does not seem like a woman who wants her life shaken up.
But when her husband’s troubled 17-year-old son Theó (Samuel Kircher) comes to stay for the summer, Anne and Théo have a brief struggle for power in the household that quickly turns into a deeply questionable affair.
Breillat’s films are notoriously challenging, both in the themes they explore and the often impartial and detached space within which they let these stories play out. But what is so compelling about the way Breillat works is the way in which she can seem so socially and politically aware without ever striving toward making a topical film. Breillat’s films do not fill in gaps or insist upon being read a certain way. They are matter-of-fact, even when they are about the tangled and contradictory internal spaces of fantasy, pleasure, sex, and power.
Without heavy-handedness, Last Summer begins to show Anne’s powerful and manipulative hand. There is quiet mention of a gift of a laptop for Théo in the midst of the summer — an act of slightly over-the-top affection that can be read just as much as a request for his silence, or even an act of grooming. As a result of her ability to both use and abuse the traditional judicial spaces she knows so well to her benefit, Anna can, at any moment, field and belittle Théo’s potential to accuse her or announce that he is uncomfortable. She can utilize her knowledge of supporting victims to limit the revelation of her own wrongdoing whenever she pleases. But these cues, moments, power dynamics, and potentially abusive practices are not harped upon in Last Summer. At moments, it feels their appearance has to be coaxed out by one’s own watchful eye. For some, Last Summer’s quietness will not be enough; for others, Anne’s moments of cruelty and wrongdoing will seem overwrought.
Breillat’s cinema of sex, pleasure, and taboo often exists between the poetic and the cerebral. Like her other controversial works, Last Summer feels entrenched in prescient sociopolitical issues, and yet demands to be read and interpreted from a deeply personal space.
