Last Summer

by Matt Weiner

The word “provocative” gets thrown around a lot in art, but French director Catherine Breillat has at least earned it over her storied career.

Last Summer, Breillat’s first film since 2013’s Abuse of Weakness, lives up to the label with an age-gap stepmother/stepson romance that dispenses with titillation to become a sharp, complicated and morally fluid examination of its leading lovers.

Anne (Léa Drucker, without whom none of this would work) is a successful middle-aged lawyer with a comfortable bourgeois life—business owner husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), two adorable young children who enjoy their horseback riding and trips to the cabin—just the sort of luxurious ennui that’s ripe to be upended.

And upended it is, when Pierre’s wayward son from a first wife comes to stay with the family after troubles at his boarding school. Théo (Samuel Kircher) is a stranger to his father almost as much as he is to Anne, but it falls to her to integrate the rebellious 17-year-old into the family.

Casual secrets and moments of raw openness between Anne and Théo quickly progress from emotional intimacy to a passionate affair. It’s a salacious premise, and the adaptation, written in collaboration with Pascal Bonitzer, is a natural fit for Breillat’s boundary-pushing explorations of sexuality.

Breillat’s rewrite of the Danish original takes almost sadistic pleasure in the unresolved ambiguity and hypocrisy on display from Anne. Drucker gives a performance that credibly swings from feminist advocate to abuser to… well, something Breillat leaves up to the audience to decide.

Last Summer is also a far more artful way of grappling with complex subjects like abuse and agency than Breillat’s blunt interviews on Harvey Weinstein in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

Anne is a compelling subject, and Last Summer refuses to condemn her as a one-note monster. In many ways, she is all the more fascinating for the way she seems unable to come to terms with her own deeply flawed behavior and actions toward Théo.

It can be an intense artistic exercise to bear the full force of Breillat’s provocations with none of the pitch-black humor of the similarly confrontational May December. There’s no clear-cut legal satisfaction here, by design. Breillat’s unsettling study of Anne and her motivations is ultimately an artistic one—and all the wallowing in moral uncertainty that goes along with that.