After ten years of absence, Catherine Breillat makes a strong comeback with Last summerremake of the Danish film Queen of Heartswhere a lawyer has an affair with her 17-year-old stepson.
A lawyer specializing in children’s rights, Anne (Léa Drucker) leads a perfect life with her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) and their adopted daughters (Serena Hu and Angela Chen). Expelled from his school in Geneva, where he lives with his mother, Théo (Samuel Kircher), Pierre’s son from a previous relationship, comes to live with the little family. While in Queen of Hearts (2019), by May el-Toukhi, it is the lawyer who seduced her stepson, in Last summerAnne and Théo spontaneously exchange a first kiss.
“The characters in the story are much more complex and human. I don’t like simplistic and rigorous things that correspond to the moral rigor of the era that wants to be established. I prefer to break that than to lose the bearings of Good and Evil, than to not tell ourselves that we are human, that we are fallible. Would we have given in? Is it a crime? A fault that she commits? No, it is not,” affirms Catherine Breillat, reached last fall by videoconference at the New York Film Festival.
While Catherine Breillat confirms that the lawyer is guilty in the eyes of the law, it is not the judicial aspect that interests her in this story, nor the incestuous nature of the relationship, but rather the context in which this affair between a mature woman and a 17-year-old adolescent develops.
“In this story, they are irresistibly in love. Attraction and love cannot be controlled. It is something that takes hold of you, and her fault is to let this emotion take hold of her. It is not just a sexual desire, it is an attraction. As soon as they return from the lake, where Anne takes Théo and the little girls, we see that they are radiant together; they are still in an extremely chaste, but obvious happiness. They have both become younger. They do not even think about this moment when they are going to sleep together.”
PHOTO SCOTT GARFITT, ARCHIVES ASSOCIATED PRESS
Producer Saïd Ben Saïd, filmmaker Catherine Breillat and actress Léa Drucker, at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2023
And yet, that moment will come because looks will no longer be enough: “It’s fascinating how you go from a relationship where the person you know is dressed and you don’t think about sleeping with them, even if something is happening that you don’t fully identify.”
That’s great, because we’re going to slowly slide towards natural intimacy. I wanted to see that it was happening naturally.
Catherine Breillat, filmmaker
“Mutual attraction can be seen, felt, and tangible,” she continues. “For a filmmaker, it’s very important to show how it exists and that it’s not just the spoken or written language. There’s also the language of emotions, silence, and facial expressions. We’ve never analyzed what this mute and indefinable language is like, yet it’s so powerful and violent.”
An impossible love
During their lovemaking, Anne marvels at Théo’s thinness. However, at the beginning of the film, while Pierre makes love to her mechanically, she tells him about a friend of her mother’s whom she loved as a teenager, a man she found old even though he was only 33. When Pierre then asks her what she thinks of him, Anne replies that she likes the signs of age on his body, going so far as to claim to be a gerontophile.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY ENCHANTÉ FILMS
Léa Drucker in Last summer
“Both are true. Anne is a woman who is happy in her marriage and in her family, but she is also a woman who carries a story in her body. Something was broken in her adolescence. She makes love in a very solitary way, like a frigid, very tense woman. With this young man, she relives in an obvious way the adolescence that was stolen from her.”
It is during a fun interview that Théo realizes that Anne experienced a traumatic event during her youth and that this could explain why she was unable to have children.
“When the young boy realizes that he is harassing her with his carelessly asked questions, he turns off the tape recorder, because he discovers that this woman he loves is devastated. Anne’s tears flow, then he kisses her as if he wants to protect her. It’s something that boys in love with older women do. They play the older man, the protector.”
It’s super charming. And that’s when we understand that Theo really loves her.
Catherine Breillat, filmmaker
However, it is an impossible love: “It is a love that I would say is inappropriate, which is neither salacious nor dirty. When they look at each other, they make each other younger. All of a sudden, she is the same age as him. It is not shocking.”
If Last summer does not end on a fatal note like Queen of Heartsits conclusion is no less glacial, which has earned Catherine Breillat the reproach of wanting to defend the bourgeoisie.
“It’s not the bourgeoisie that I defend, but conjugal love, which is wonderful, where you are protected as if in a cocoon. Obviously, a butterfly is not going to come out of this cocoon. With her husband, there is still a deprivation of fantasy and freedom. With this young man, it is grace, youth rediscovered. They want us to believe that women cannot be loved by young boys, but it is the absolute truth. Just as young girls can fall in love with older men,” concludes the filmmaker.
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