Review: “Last Summer” will make you squirm

by Cláudio Alves

In 2019, May el-Toukhy's Queen of Hearts was a study about power imbalances and masterful manipulation. As a wealthy lawyer who starts an affair with her teenage stepson, Trine Dyrholm embodied a sickening conundrum - someone who defends the abused in the public eye but is an abuser in private. Chilly and sharp, the actress delivered a terrifying performance, opaque in ways we'd expect her to be transparent, a mystery whose actions precipitate a devastating end. Indeed, the Danish film could be described as a tragedy, and it made for a particularly unsettling entry in the season's Best International Film race.

Five years later, Catherine Breillat's French remake arrives in American theaters, offering a most perverse twist on the same premise. Rather than tragedy, Last Summer presents the affair as something closer to farce…

Do you remember the debates May December caused a few months ago? When some described Todd Haynes' film as a comedy, many took to social media, decrying the horror in such a view. How could this film, obviously inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal, inspire laughter? No matter the hyper-artifice and constructed camp, no matter the disruptive score and the ludicrous lines, to approach the picture as a piece playing with humor appeared to be a moral violation for many in the audience. I'd argue that the discomfort is the point, and that the spectator's ugly reactions are essential to the film's stratagem.

By flirting with farce, Haynes set up a trap. One minute, some wild swing inspires a jolt of humor, and then the next, a razor-sharp cruelty will have you sit with the wrongness of that short-lived amusement. In other words, the film makes you complicit in the societal structures, the very media apparatus that has brutalized the characters most hurt in the story May December. Often this happens at the level of contrasting registers, actors out of tune with one another, or tonal awkwardness manifesting through different levels of the formal edifice. It's incredible we got such a film in the first place. It's even crazier that we got two at the same festival.

In the span of a few days, last year's Cannes Film Festival audiences saw the world premieres of Haynes' May December and the similarly themed Last Summer, where Breillat also elicits discomfort born out of amoral pleasures, comedy from forbidden subjects, and an older woman's predation on a minor. Not that the director's sun-kissed obscenity deploys the same mechanisms favored by her colleague. On the contrary, as Haynes pulled from specific facets of the American entertainment industry, so does Breillat develop a strategy indebted to her country's audiovisual traditions, from sex comedy to intellectual justifications for transgression. Hers is a combination of devices that are equal parts trap and escape – from moral binaries, from ethics, from any and all judgment.

Starting with the film's surface delights, it's difficult to overstate just how lovely Last Summer looks. DP Jeanne Lapoirie has moved away from the coldness seen in some of Breillat's past pictures, preferring to indulge in the summer sun's warmth as it licks up bodies and dapples light across private Edens. Like pastoral postcards, each scene is a new treat to appreciate without much thought. It's as if Lapoirie and Breillat are promoting the viewer's passivity. You're invited to bask in the prettiness and, perchance, drift to memories of Rohmer's seasonal filmography, his moral tales, and green rays. But the comfort is deceitful, contentment barbed with sharp points that will get you one way or another.

Visually, the dynamic is most apparent in Breillat's mise-en-scène, how she illustrates her protagonist's constant lies through composition. A breakfast conversation with the husband may lead to a discussion on the troubled teen's fate, a character assassination unfolding on two levels of the frame. In the foreground, picturesque domesticity dominates. In the background, through glass and more reflections of idyllic nature, the boy witnesses the scene. We're privy to a comedy of errors and its human cost simultaneously. Another example comes with Breillat's leveraging of closeups, whether in moments of confrontation or abandon.

Sex scenes are sustained looks at visages contorted by ecstasy, more clownish than erotic. Even the director's brand of graphic nudity is absent in favor of these acts of facial contortionism. Tragedy turns into comedy if given enough time, but François Quiqueré's cutting shows the same can happen to eros. As for the confrontation proper, the closest the picture ever comes to the tension its premise may suggest, the scene is equally disquieting and just as prone to trip into absurdity. While I don't want to belabor the comparison, it's helpful to consider Last Summer in relation to its Scandinavian original.

In 2019, the lawyer's most damaging falsity erupts when she's caught between a rock and a hard place, destroying a father's already fragile trust in his son with a well-aimed performance. It's staged to the tenets of detachment and acted accordingly. One is outside the character's interiority, confronted by the choice rather than part of it. Breillat moves against that impulse for a safe distance. The Gallic director prefers a stifling closeness, instead. She doesn't construct the moment to terrify the viewer either but to disturb and challenge, to complicate the understanding someone may have over this woman, testing its limits. 

So, she fixes the camera on her actress' face and doesn't let go. Every cog in the machine seizes in fits and starts, panic vomited and projected by a somersaulting expression. Rather than a Machiavelian mistress, Breillat's transgressor is a lousy liar, cracking under pressure and fumbling for an easy way out. It's hard not to gape at such a high-wire act, especially when the strain is so evident, the flop sweat practically seeping through the screen. After this moment, much of the characterization percolates on those ideas, with the filmmakers finding endless variations of incompetent monstrosity that's always short-circuited by desire. 

To put it crudely, this woman is dickmatized beyond reason. Or maybe she is motivated by something else other than her stepson's carnal potential. Perhaps it's the promise of self-annihilation that comes with such a risky move. Following that thought, the viewer might uncover a more daring gesture than the filmmaker's willingness to milk laughter out of Last Summer's premise. Consider how Catherine Breillat contextualizes the character's actions within the sickening satisfaction of privileged femininity. As much as a tale of sexual wants, this is a story of class and how it manifests across gender roles. 

Of course, none of this would be possible without Léa Drucker in the lead role, making Breillat's Anne into a figure that represents broader concepts while still working as a full-fleshed madwoman. Her performance is based on a push and pull by which the lawyer extends her hand to the fire and pulls away the instant she feels any pain. It's a calculated charade, a way to take risks without much actual risk. It's an oxymoron that only makes sense when one reflects upon the bourgeois boredom of Anne's existence. She wants for nothing yet feels the prickle of dissatisfaction inherent to the human condition and further fortified by the social part she plays. So, she embarks on this foolish affair to feel alive, in control, maybe even in peril.

Drucker plays it as a folly, and Breillat is always ready to frame it as sheer stupidity, the self-inflicted lunacy of someone who grew tired of paradise. As for the boy, he's presented with as little charm as possible. Sure, there's the magnetism of youth, but neither Samuel Kircher nor his director shy away from the character's immaturity, the childishness still latent in these final chapters before adulthood. Seeing Anne compromise everything about herself and her "perfect life" for this misbegotten summer fling is nothing if not embarrassing. Breillat has weaponized cringe and built a monument in its honor.

Don't doubt it, for despite its breezy nature and modest scale, Last Summer is an obelisk. Basking in Rohmer's sun, it glistens with gilded shame and the polish of a wincing laugh. It also proves that remakes need not be a sign of creative bankruptcy. With Catherine Breillat in the director's chair, they might be some of the most bracing cinema you'll see all year. 

Last Summer is now in theaters, enjoying a limited release by Sideshow and Janus Films.