Anne (Léa Drucker) is a lawyer whose clients are often abused teens and young adults.  She lives an idyllic life in Paris with her husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), and their two adopted daughters.  Their calm is upended, though, when Théo (Samuel Kircher), Pierre’s 17 year old son from his previous marriage, moves in with the family.  He fits well into his new environment, but for Anne his presence brings a thrilling sense of danger as the two engage in an affair that would not only ruin her career, but her family as well, if their secret is ever to get out. 

Catherine Breillat premiered Last Summer in competition at the 2023 edition of the Cannes Film Festival under its original French title, L’été dernier.  She worked with Pascal Bonitzer on the page, adapting the Danish film, Queen of Hearts (2019).  The erotic thriller – though to use so blunt on a genre term feels a disservice to the quiet film – was distributed in the States through a collaboration of Janus Films and Sideshow where, for surely a multitude of reasons, it struggled to find its audience as cinemas were not clamoring to book an incestuous and underaged romance. 

The subject nature aside, it feels like it wants to at least draw attention to the argument that sexual assault is handled differently when it is an older woman engaging with a younger male.  Breillat and Bonitzer can be said by some to have shown restraint by not ending their film in a salacious, extended court room trial, especially with French legal thrillers becoming international successes as of late thanks to Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022) and Justine Triet‘s Anatomy of a Fall (2023).  This may be more due to the film being an adapted work more than a creative chouse on their part, but it does deny the audiences a more direct view into the philosophy of the film, what drove the creative team to examine this story, and therefore what drove these otherwise intelligent characters to act out in this way.  We feel a little crazy watching these events unfold as script does not allow for too much introspection or understanding of the characters as Todd Hayes did in his similarly themed albeit alternatively structured May December (2023).  By skirting by the heavier aspects of the plot, the cast also struggles how to bring this story to the screen as they travel on their track towards inevitable destruction, but the script does not offer them much context to inform their decisions. 

This is most evident in Anne who fills the role of lead, but she is a blank slate of a character with very little depth or nuance to her.  She is more the valley in which the story flows than the guiding hand.  There is some blunt irony in that a lawyer working to bring justice to victims of assault is engaging in the kind of behavior which she is fighting against, but Last Summer seems almost comet at leaving the situation with that irony and not actually exploiting it. Even beyond her profession, Anne is a mentally sound adult that knows her flirting engagement with her stepson is crossing all sorts of boundaries; legally, ethically, and morally.  The script offers Anne a few moments before the two consummate their affair to show some questionable judgement, but it is never enough to convince us as an audience that this character would knowingly and willingly engage with a teenager and by not believing in this central conceit, we struggle to stay engaged with the entire film. Narratively, the script gives Anne plenty of opportunity to step back and disengage this whole situation, and to her credit she sort of tries, but like so much else both directly about how Anne is written and how the entire script is composed, it is only a half effort.   Further, the script is not weaponozing our disbelief towards what we are seeing against us so it truly comes across more as a weakness in the writing than a failed approach at its argument.  

Theo fares a little better here, but the young actor has a tough role to fill because the script is trying to play both sides and refuses to commit to why he is behaving this way.  To be generous, the film is trying to frame itself as an ambiguous mystery, evidenced in how Anne and Theo’s first kiss is framed by Jeanne Lapoirie in such a way that it is not 100% clear who initiated it.  As the film progresses, Theo becomes more and more daring, taking the relationship into his own hands, but it is never clear why.  Lapoirie’s camera begins to capture him in a more seductively dangerous light, allowing shadows to dance across his face, and Kircher always maintains a bit of menace behind his eyes so that while we somehow convince ourselves to sympathize with him, we never fully trust him. Again, this uncertainty is brought about from a disconnect with what is on the page versus what is on the screen. Theo’s actions do not always seem to be arrived at simply to get the edge over Anne, nor does he seem to actually be following his adolescent heart; he does not fight with Anne before all of this, but he does not seem all to interested in her in any real way, either.  He does not leverage this relationship to try and gain power over her, or favor. Styled not unlike Björn Andrésen’s Tadzio in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971), Theo never quite feels like the siren he is made out to be, but Kricher still hones the edge of his performance with a dangerous, youthful bravado that helps make the narrative more engaging to watch against Drucker’s more metered – and, honestly, down right dull – performance. 

Last Summer has all the makings to be a searing and sizzling drama, but comes off more like a well shot soap opera.  The story is frank in its twisted social subject matter in a way that is something which has been long admired as a facet of French cinema, and Breillat, coming off a decade-long hiatus is working with the same air of confidence as she dissects and interrogates the clashing of the maternal psyche and the female gaze.  She does not intentionally disarm Anne, but she does not seem to totally understand her, either, which makes for a less surgical than needed treatment on the page especially when audiences come into the film knowing she is in the wrong and are seeking her justification.  That being said, the film is very intentional in its construction so we feel the danger on their first sexual encounter from the shot composition, but there is a lack of true catharsis at the end, or a culminating statement, even, that the craft of the film, handsome as it is, just can not make up for.