Last Summer review – Catherine Breillat plays it safe with this illicit stepmother-stepson love affair

There are two reasons why you may find yourself feeling short-changed by Last Summer, French provocateur Catherine Breillat’s first film in a decade. First: you may be well acquainted with the original, 2019’s Queen of Hearts, which, in its own right, was an icy, bile-inducing affair that tested the viewer’s mettle with its depiction of a villainous fiftysomething playing with the sexual and emotional needs of her vulnerable stepson. Second: you are a regular disciple of Breillat’s fraught, queasy, discordant works, whose features such as Romance and Fat Girl remain pioneering, masterful examples of New French Extremity and fuck-you feminism.

That’s not to say that Last Summer, about a married lawyer and the 17-year-old stepson she fucks, is for the normies. But given the shock factor of the original and what we know this director is capable of, this oddly comic, relatively tasteful affair may feel like small potatoes for the Breillat-heads among us hoping for something truly transgressive.

Following May El-Toukhy's original film almost beat-for-beat aside from a divergent ending, Last Summer introduces us to Anne, a successful lawyer aged around 50, who lives happily with her husband and their two young adopted daughters. Everything turns on its head when her husband’s wayward son Théo (Samuel Kircher, the spitting image of his mother Irène Jacob) returns to the scene having been expelled from his school. The two begin an illicit affair, which naturally ends in chaos, lies and abuse.

Breillat exhibits some astounding directorial skills here; one can’t quite tell, before their first transgression, whether they’re actually standing that close to one another, or whether it’s just some nifty, claustrophobic framing. Their first kiss is repulsive not because of their ages or power imbalance, but because we’re locked in a horrifying, adroit angle of spit and dialled-up sound design. Later liaisons are sticky with tears, mucus and saliva. The sex scenes themselves are protracted, breathy; all we can do is squirm while this narcissistic abuser and vulnerable child hump at each other. For the love scenes, Breillat explains that she was inspired by Caravaggio’s painting “Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy” – seeing similarity in Drucker’s aquiline nose, finding an intriguing push-and-pull between that painting’s melange of pleasure and pain.

But herein lies the film’s fatal flaw: it wants you to sympathise with Drucker, to see the love between them as pure, tragic and Shakespearean. This never happens. With his childish retorts and general “no one understands me!” vibe, Théo is resolutely, entirely, a child, and her girlish airs to match him are nothing short of pitiful. There’s also the essentially (accidentally?) funny editing that smash-cuts between them saying “we shouldn’t be doing this!” to them suddenly locked in coitus, like a taboo porn video aware of its own mannered, wink-wink nudge-nudge construction.

It’s a shame, because Breillat is the best of us, and nobody does illicit, taboo desire like her. So why is this so swooning and sickly? Why is Drucker’s performance so glazed, a semi-torpor like three glasses of wine in the afternoon? There is real skill on display here, and Breillat’s refusal to judge her characters is not the issue – it all just ends with a whimper as opposed to, er, a bang.

Last Summer screened as part of the Cannes Film Festival 2023. A UK release date is yet to be announced.