Catherine Breillat is often considered a “taboo breaker”. This is both true and reductive. What interests the French filmmaker is female desire: its workings as well as its possible excesses. This, ofA real girlabout the secret fantasies of a teenage girl, Romanceon the sexual tribulations of a frustrated woman in her relationship, through To my sister !, on another teenager who witnessed the first experiences of her elder sister. Presented at the Festival du nouveau cinéma (FNC), which this year pays tribute to him, Last summer sees the director continue this exploration which has earned her many controversies.
Presented in competition at Cannes, Last summer tells the story of how a lawyer specializing in sexual assault, Anne (Léa Drucker), comes to commit incest with her 17-year-old stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher). It is a remake of the Danish film Dronningenby director May el-Toukhy.
“When I was asked to do this remake, I was initially worried that it would be because of hypothetical explicit sexual scenes in the original. And I’ve already done that. When it’s the subject, I show. But when I saw the film, I understood that that was not the subject,” relates Catherine Breillat, joined by videoconference before her visit to Montreal.
“The subject was lies, since the protagonist denies the obvious. However, who better than anyone can deny the evidence, if not criminal lawyers? The plot device was brilliant. Besides the lie, there is the denial: I constantly go from one to the other, with all the characters. It is also a film about the contradictions within us. »
In the same breath, Catherine Breillat specifies: “I didn’t want a predator, nor a raped teenager. I wanted a lusting teenager. I am from the homeland of Musset and Marivaux. »
In many ways, Théo is a descendant of Alice, in love with an adult man in A real girl.
“I’m quite monomaniacal: I always dig the same furrow. Although it’s a remake, it’s still one hundred percent my film: I made it my own. I changed the meaning. »
A cold calculation
The prologue, an exchange between Anne and a teenage client who was a victim of rape, is powerful. It becomes even more so a posteriori when Anne herself uses, in front of Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), her husband who questions her, the rhetoric consisting of discrediting the victim – rhetoric which she herself exposed from the outset. Anne’s cold calculation makes the confrontation extremely destabilizing.
“The Danish script is brilliant,” says Catherine Breillat. However, I transformed quite a few things. For example, when Théo goes to see Anne at work and tells her that he wants to confess everything to his father, in the original film, the character speaks in the first degree. In mine, it’s more of a love scene. Anne is very tough, because she has a job, but we can see that she is troubled by Théo. As for Théo, he is completely lost in the face of this experienced adult who knows how to use words much better than him. And both say the opposite of what they really mean. »
Note that during all these passages, the filmmaker willingly favors the close-up, on purpose.
“When we are in a close relationship with the other, when we scrutinize them, we see them in close-up; we try to absorb his face. That’s what I do with the camera. Take the sequence in which Pierre confronts Anne: I film Pierre in close-up, and the way in which he scrutinizes her shows the power she exercises over him. »
Even when she is not in the frame, as during this close-up on Pierre, Anne remains omnipresent.
“Exactly: it happens more than once that Anne is absent from the image, and that it is the one who looks at her who gives the image of her. This is a fairly new form of cinematographic writing: the shot without reverse shot. Anne is absent, but she is the one described. »
In the film, Catherine Breillat’s gaze could be described as objective. In that she shows without judging, leaving it to moviegoers to play the roles of the juries — Anne is, after all, a lawyer.
“It’s very intentional. As filmmakers, we have responsibilities towards our actors, but not towards the public. I film the human soul, not moralism. I am not a Tartuffe. The “hide this penis or this breast that I can’t see” aspect, very little for me […] This couple is initially very happy: they still make love and are not in companionship. Then something devastating happens… When love takes hold of us, there’s nothing we can do about it. »
A human subject
When asked how she feels at the prospect of this tribute that the FNC has in store for her, the filmmaker smiles.
“I’m very happy, because at one point, I was considered sulphurous, which is not true. I am talking about a crucial human subject, which is desire, and the survival of the human species depends in large part on desire. Except that we have often treated desire with prudishness, as if it were immoral. We girls were taught not to have desires, to have decency. In all my films, I favor variations of desire that are different from the moral order. »
Moreover, the filmmaker confides that she fears that cinema will become moralistic.
“The #MeToo movement was great, because we showed that something was wrong with the relationship between men and women. It was essential. But there is a backlash. From now on, it is used by right-thinking which brings back a terrifying moral order – and which will only contribute to creating more people who do not know how to think and understand desire, their own as well as that of others. Ah, we don’t have the right to talk about this or that in the cinema, because, morally, it’s not right! »
Catherine Breillat evokes here the exit of Christine Angot, who, on France Inter, attacked both the director and the French critics, who gave a rave reception to Last summer (five stars in Les Inrockuptibles, Marie Claire, Télérama; four stars in Le Monde, Libération, Elle, Les Cahiers du cinéma, etc.). The author of Incest believes that we cannot be moved by the account that Camille Kouchner gives of the incest perpetrated on her brother by their stepfather in her book The big familyand celebrate two years later a film like Last summer.
“Christine Angot wrote a virulent, violent column against the film, which according to her is an aestheticization and legitimization of incest. Well no. It’s fiction. She confuses reality and fiction. So artists would now be prohibited from telling and filming, in fiction, certain subjects in the name of moralism? I don’t want moralistic art. »
To conclude Catherine Breillat: “I don’t think we benefit from hiding things. We are more subtle and moving than that, we human beings. »
The film Last summer is presented on October 13 and 14 at the FNC, where Catherine Breillat will give a film lesson on the 14th as well. The film will be released in 2024.