The Summer of ‘Last Summer’

“Workmanlike” and “French provocateur” wouldn’t seem to describe the same filmmaker, but that’s just what Catherine Breillat has become. Breillat has flirted with experimentalism, but truly found her footing as a pure dramatist, evidenced by 2014’s solid Abuse of Weakness and now, the fascinating modernized Rohmer subversion Last Summer. She deploys the purest of filmmaking techniques: blocking, conversation editing and framing, and performance management. While she’s succeeded in the Dionysian abstract before (more in The Sleeping Beauty than Anatomy of Hell), the simpler the conflict’s delineations, the better for her. Though of course, the clean cut and lucid shape of the warped Last Summer is only simple within its complexity.

Anne is a lawyer specializing in child sexual abuse. She also allows herself to fall for her flirtatious delinquent stepson, Theo. There’s your core conflict! Except it’s not; it grounds merely one facet of Anne’s character in her hypocrisy, or more specifcally the public-political/private-perverse double life so many of us lead, if hopefully not THIS sinfully. Lea Drucker’s performance is the film’s standout feature, as she must give a performance within a performance in convincing her husband Pierre of Theo’s ill will and her innocence. There’s no blink in Drucker, Anne as convincing an actress as she is, conjuring such ferocious denial of the dark truth that Pierre’s newfound bond with his estranged son tears apart even deeper.

What’s even slimier about this is not merely the nature of the offense, made all the more grotesque with the frankest, rawest sex scenes you’re likely to see this year (beware, Zoomers!), but the fact that Theo was getting his act together as their affair took place. He actually loves her, to the extent that he as a warped child of divorce can differentiate it, and she legitimately betrays him, succumbing him to a spiral that should by rights befall her. The true initiator is ambiguous, or rather, mutual, her desire unbound by an irresponsibility typically reserved for, well, teenage boys. She’s simply feckless, practiced in legalistic morality pimping, not the hero predator buster lawyer but ruthlessly pragmatic in getting her desired perceptual outcome, for client or wicked self. Her true essence, despite all this, is human, the most radical of Breillat’s framing decisions.

The brilliance of the film’s character study is less in its dramatic setup (it’s a remake of Danish film, Queen of Hearts, after all), though it’s beautifully bracing to see a film with this subject matter so ballsily meet Our Current Moment. Breillat’s execution is what really cements the depth of the conflict here. Some of the most expertly deployed closeups you will see all year are here, inner turmoil consuming everyone with only so much physical capacity to outwardly express it. She powerfully uses tableaus with Spielbergian optimization, though subtler.

Weirdly, it almost looked to me like the framerate tics up in the most uncomfortable moments, a la Ang Lee’s great experiment in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Even as successful as the provocation, unresolved and thorny, the sheer precision of the dramatic direction is what truly impresses. The film world has long undervalued Breillat and, for this, she deserves a Rennaissance.