French filmmaker Catherine Breillat is back at Cannes, breaking boundaries at the age of 74 with her latest film, Last Summer. This time, she confronts the taboo subject of sex between adults and children. Breillat has never shied away from controversy, having worked with porn stars and earned the nickname “porno auteuriste” for showing an erection in an arthouse film. While Last Summer is less graphic, it is just as disquieting. The film follows a woman in early middle-age who has an explosive affair with her teenage stepson, causing a bourgeois family to fracture and paper over the cracks with lies and hypocrisy. Breillat’s politically charged film is highly uncomfortable to watch, but it is a necessary exploration of a taboo subject that is still ring-fenced from liberal tolerance.
Theo, the teenage stepson, is not a child in a legal sense, but he is not quite an adult either. He lounges around his father’s house, smoking, drinking, and bringing home girls for sex. He is suspended from school for hitting a teacher and is too young to live independently. When he develops a crush on his stepmother Anne, he pursues her with a child’s determination to have his way. The steam of passion rises, and the summer heat provides ample opportunity for their affair to flourish.
Anne is betraying not only her marriage to Theo’s father but also her idea of herself. She is a family lawyer working as a children’s advocate, severe with her clients and rigorously controlled in her own life. She runs a smooth household where even breakfast is an opportunity for elegance. Her evenings are spent annotating reports from child protection authorities. Theo is a rogue element in all of this, but the little girls adore him, and so does their mother.
Breillat shows their pleasure, which is very definitely genital, largely through their faces. Their first encounter is intense, with Theo gazing intensely at Anne, his breath catching, his final release joyful. The next time, we stay with Anne. Her eyes are closed, her throat tight. She reaches an ecstasy notably absent from the amiable nightcap sex she has with her husband. These sequences are much more uncomfortable to watch than a tangle of legs arranged by an intimacy coordinator would be, and they are longer than current convention dictates. Breillat is cavalier with details of plot or their predicament, and a court case that threatens to ruin Anne’s career passes by and is somehow resolved entirely offstage. Where she never skimps is in the encounters between Anne and Theo.
The sheer force of this concentration makes Anne’s subsequent rejection, not only of Theo himself but of the truth of events once there is a threat of exposure, all the more devastating. To hear a children’s advocate tell a young person that nobody will believe his word against hers makes us gasp. Is this really the abandoned lover of previous scenes, who laughed at nothing out of sheer happiness and risked everything? And yet, in the same instant, her mendacity rings perfectly true. So does her cruelty. She has too much to protect.
Breillat is not merely a cinematic shock jock, going for effect over substance. Outrage is her weapon, and in Last Summer, every shot finds its target. The film stars Lea Drucker, Samuel Kircher, Olivier Rabourdin, and Clotilde Courau and runs for 1 hour and 44 minutes. It is being sold by Pyramide International.
