Anne (Lea Drucker), the heroine of Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer, which opens around Israel on August 1, is asked about her greatest fear, and she replies, “For everything to disappear, or worse, for me to do all I can to make everything disappear. It’s my vertigo theory. Vertigo isn’t the fear of falling; it’s the fear of the irrepressible temptation to fall. It’s so awful that it’s better to jump to stop the fear.”
Anne seems to have everything. She lives with her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), an executive, in a gorgeous home in the suburbs of Paris, where she is raising their adopted Asian daughters.
She is also a brilliant legal advocate for at-risk minors. Everyone and everything in her life is beautiful, especially her lovely wardrobe, and she has a pair of pumps to match each dress. Even their coffee maker is tasteful-looking.
But then her 17-year-old stepson, Theo (Samuel Kircher), comes to live with them, and her worst fears are soon realized; she starts putting everything good in her life at risk.
He is an aimless kid, full of resentment at his father for leaving his mother and destined to fail his matriculation exams if he ever takes them. But he’s also handsome and sexy, and she falls into a passionate sexual affair with him.
The movie is the story of their illicit and immoral relationship, the kind that once upon a time was winked at when the younger person was a male teenager but is now viewed as a serious criminal offense.
Breaking one boundary after another
One of the most disturbing aspects of the movie is not the sexual scenes but that it’s unclear how we are meant to react to them. As Anne breaks one boundary after another, we are drawn into her desire, and it makes sense that her orderly life doesn’t fulfill her and that she can’t resist this boy when he makes the first move.
But it’s in the dissolution of the affair that it becomes clear that her real crime isn’t physical – I know that, technically, it is – but emotional, as she denies to him that there was any connection between them. When he tries to get to know her better, questioning her about her first lover, she says she doesn’t want to go there. “Some things should never have happened,” she says, to which he replies, “Like us?” She shuts him down with, “There is no us,” to which he responds, “For me, there is.”
As their story spirals downwards, there are moments when you begin to root for her to get away without facing any legal or personal consequences. This aspect of the movie reminds me of the second-most-famous scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, when Norman Bates sinks his victim’s car in a lake, and, for a moment, it seems that it’s going to float but you hope that it sinks.
It takes skill to evoke such conflicting emotions in an audience, and Breillat, best known for her early movies, Romance and Fat Girl, where she explores similarly taboo sides of female sexuality, certainly has it. Her movies are filled with raw emotion, and she never allows the viewer to feel complacent.
The two leads, Lea Drucker and Samuel Kircher, both give accomplished performances playing characters who could easily have seemed like caricatures. The much older woman-teenage boy affair story is being told more often in movies these days, and it’s hard to say whether that’s because it truly is happening more in real life or because it’s a new subject for filmmakers to play with.
Last Summer bears some similarities to last year’s Todd Haynes film, May December, which starred Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman. The film tells the story of a woman who confessed her guilt, later married the boy, and, in a sense, ruined his life by stealing his youth. In Last Summer, the woman ruins the boy’s life by not acknowledging her culpability in a well-made, complex story of an affair that should never have happened.
Until the last moments of Last Summer, Breillat takes the audience on a conflict-filled journey that mirrors that of the heroine, who vacillates between sympathetic and supremely unlikable from one moment to the next.
One further note: In the many years I have been reviewing movies, no one has ever asked me about a movie’s producer, and as a rule, I don’t mention them. However, I am making an exception for Said Ben Said, the Tunisian-born, French Muslim producer of Last Summer.
A producer outspoken about Israel
He has been outspoken about antisemitism around the world, particularly among Muslims, and has worked with Israeli directors and participated in Israeli film festivals, such as the Jerusalem Film Festival, where he was on the jury in 2017. And he has paid a price.
In November, he wrote in an op-ed for Le Monde that he received an invitation to lead the jury at the 28th Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia, only to have the invitation revoked. “[It] must be admitted that the Arab world is, in its majority, antisemitic. This hatred of Jews has redoubled in intensity and depth not because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but with the rise of a certain vision of Islam,” he wrote.
If we condemn those who are antisemitic, then we owe it to creators like Ben Said to celebrate their bravery.