Review of 'The Last Summer': A messy, honest and illicit relationship

There's no way to defend what Anne, a successful lawyer and mother, does when she begins a relationship with her 17-year-old stepson, Théo, in the incandescent French drama Last Summer. And the director, Catherine Breillat, makes no attempt to defend or condemn her. That's because her exhilarating new film is, above all, a study of human behavior, when the follies of desire send even the most stable life off its axis.

Taboo French dramas can still conjure up the image of old-school arthouse cinema that promised forbidden pleasures. But Breillat is a veteran of provocation with a keen eye and a purpose. She has spent decades revamping the way movies portray sex, love and the power dynamics and complicated attractions between men and women. “The Last Summer” shows us Anne (an incredibly nuanced and frankly Oscar-worthy performance from Léa Drucker) and offers us not an intellectual titillation, but a woman in her fullest form.

The film boldly opens with Anne in her law office, preparing a tearful teenager to testify about a sexual assault. She warns her client about how she may be judged. Anne then returns home to live a life of sun-drenched bourgeois comfort: two adorable little daughters, a sincere, hard-working husband, a house shaded by trees. She may be bored with dinner parties, but Anne copes with her feisty sister and loves her family.

Théo (newcomer Samuel Kircher) returns home after problems at school and worries about his father, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), Anne's husband. The boy seems like a summer sweetheart, but he has a childish, petulant air that neither Kircher nor Breillat interpret coldly. The serene Anne probably sees Théo as a family problem to be solved, rather than as Pierre's project.

The days pass in indifferent conviviality, until we begin to notice Anne's glimmer of interest, which first manifests itself when she goes AWOL to meet Théo in a tavern. The credibility of the ensuing disaster depends on the supreme talents of star and director: Drucker, in showing how an otherwise civilized person lucidly slides into disaster; and Breillat in perfecting the whole nitty-gritty of finely tuned camerawork and blocking that doesn't get enough credit but creates emotional reality.

The unpredictable accumulation of events around their first kiss exemplifies Breillat’s mastery, as it happens while Pierre is away on business and they are both looking at something on a cell phone. When Anne and Théo have sex, she says it mustn’t happen again, but of course it does. Without focusing on scenes of sex or seduction, the narrative makes it clear that the romance is ongoing, while Anne tries almost absurdly to hide it from her husband. There’s almost a “don’t go in the basement!” quality to witnessing Anne’s helpless fascination and the couple’s libido-addled decision-making.

One of the film’s three sex scenes focuses on Anne’s orgasmic pleasure, in a shot that Breillat says was inspired by a Caravaggio painting. We witness her fullness as a sexual being, but within the framework of a wildly inappropriate relationship. She is unmistakably excited; at one point she is seen driving her car to the tune of a fiendishly catchy Sonic Youth song.

Uncomfortable stories have been Breillat's passion since her first feature film, 1976's “A Real Young Girl,” about a teenager who explores her sensuality without regard for decorum. That film's release was delayed for decades, mostly because the protagonist's unbridled desire for it had to do with her, not the audience watching. (In a recent press interview for “Last Summer,” Breillat nonchalantly observed: “Eroticism is men looking at women as consumer goods.”)

Since then, Breillat has created some of the world’s most important work chronicling how women and girls experience sex and understand their sexuality (comparable in some ways to the films of Jane Campion). Highlights range from 2001’s “Fat Girl,” about a 12-year-old girl’s sexual awakening with her older sister on vacation, to the crushing game of sexual succession in her Asia Argento-starring period drama “The Last Mistress.”

Throughout her career and in “The Last Summer,” Breillat has focused on unequal and even damaging dynamics, because she acknowledges both the realities of oppressive gender relations and the fact that self-discovery often involves transgression, whether society approves of it or not — which is mostly not the case, she argues, when it comes to female sexuality.

If anything, “Last Summer” is more commercial-looking and less impactful than much of Breillat's previous work, but his eye and ideas are sharper than ever. Her own story reveals an iron-willed mind that won't quit: Breillat, now 75, kept going after a stroke in 2004 that left her partially paralyzed and contributed to the 10-year gap since her last her project.

His latest film reaches a cinematographic landscape in which, until recently, people complained about the lack of sex in new releases. Well, Breillat has been here all along and with “Last Summer” he roars once again.