Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer

When Breillat’s Last Summer premiered in Cannes last year, several years had passed since her previous feature, Abuse of Weakness (2013). Producer Saïd Ben Saïd had approached her with the idea of adapting May el-Toukhy’s Queen of Hearts (2019), the story of an affair between a middle-aged lawyer and her teenage stepson. “He thought . . . well, that I could do it better,” Breillat told Loayza.

The years between Abuse of Weakness and Last Summer “have not remotely slackened the daring and thoughtfulness of Breillat’s compositions, realized with lustrous tactility by her new cinematographer, Jeanne Lapoirie (BPM [Beats Per Minute], Benedetta),” writes Matthew Eng at Reverse Shot. “Last Summer is not so much a provocation or the immersion in perversion that those who know only of the logline and Breillat’s career might be led to believe. This is a master class in emotional precision, one grounded in the knowledge that even the most durable of moral compasses can shatter in the face of a monstrous and deranging need.”

Anne (Léa Drucker) is introduced preparing a young victim of abuse for cross-examination. Her marriage to Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) is solid, and life with their two adopted daughters (Serena Hu and Angela Chen; everyone agrees that they’re adorable) is good. When Théo (Samuel Kircher), Pierre’s son from a previous marriage, is kicked out of school, he comes to live with the family in their idyllic home out in the country.

“Once the kid arrives and peels off his shirt, playing peekaboo under a crown of floppy hair, it seems fairly clear where the story is headed,” wrote the New York Times’s Manohla Dargis in a dispatch from Cannes. “Yet there’s nothing obvious about this movie, which, with shifting camera angles, differing points of view, and gradually escalating emotional violence, creates an extraordinarily complex inquiry into desire and power.”

Reviewing “Breillat’s most heartbreaking film to date” for Sight and Sound, Ela Bittencourt finds that the casting of Drucker is “ingenious: with her elegance and soft expression, she is hardly a stereotypically tempestuous heroine. Inspired by baroque ecstatic painting, including Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy (1606), Breillat stages Anne’s sex scenes with deliberate unnaturalness. In orgasmic bliss, Drucker’s slim body, captured in prolonged close-ups, contorts and arches strangely; the ensuing stillness and silence are also odd, conveying an almost spiritual air, perhaps to suggest that Anne finds not just rapture but a beatific harmony, however fleeting, in having Théo as stepson and lover.”

Anne, “remorseful and fearful, swears Théo to secrecy,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, “but the coverup quickly becomes the bigger and better drama: a conflict of terrifying intensity and bitter irony, taut with emotional violence and looming menace.” For Chuck Bowen at Slant, Last Summer “somehow feels tight, open and leisurely, and cloaked in dread all at once.”

“By Breillat’s standards,” writes Guy Lodge at Film of the Week, “this is an unprecedentedly sleek commercial play, alluring and grabby—yet with an innate, considered nastiness, an unspoken intellectualization of our least explicable instincts, that never feels compromised. If she remade Fifty Shades of Grey next, I wouldn’t doubt her.”

Before its summerlong run through North American theaters, Last Summer will open on Friday at Film at Lincoln Center, where the retrospective Carnal Knowledge: The Films of Catherine Breillat is winding down. Breillat will be in New York to take part in four Q&As, starting with this evening’s sneak preview with Madeline Whittle moderating. Hosting the other three Q&As are Alison Willmore on Friday, Ira Sachs on Saturday, and Beatrice Loayza on Sunday.