Last Summer (Catherine Breillat, 2023).
Catherine Breillat holds eye contact with such intensity that it’s difficult not to feel a little intimidated in her presence. It’s an apt trait for a filmmaker of equally, and brilliantly, intimidating films. Unafraid, even eager, to cause discomfort, Breillat has dedicated her career to the cinematic excavation of taboo subjects and liberating female desire onscreen.
With her first film in ten years, Last Summer, Breillat presents a reworking of May el-Toukhy’s 2019 film Queen of Hearts in which a lawyer, predominantly working on sexual assault cases, has an affair with her 17-year-old stepson. The project is challenging in the ways you might expect from the filmmaker, but somehow tamer, too; the sex is not explicit in the manner of Romance (1999) or Anatomy of Hell (2004), nor are the shocks quite as violent as they are in her widely celebrated Fat Girl (2001). Her approach here feels more attuned to romance and sensitivity than blunt extremity. This is partly because of the innocence she sees in the relationship between Anne (a radiant Léa Drucker) and troubled teen Théo (Samuel Kircher), both of whom discover an untapped inner confidence through their engagement with one another. It’s also because such a provocative treatment would fail to convey the insidious nature of the film’s queasier truths. They creep under the surface, hidden in the bourgeois comforts of Anne and husband Pierre’s (Olivier Rabourdin) life, especially the easy lies they tell each other.
When Théo tries to come clean to his estranged father, tormented by the lust and confusion of his relationship with Anne, Pierre finds it all too easy to refute this. But he knows his son isn’t deceiving him, and so does Anne’s sister Mina (Clotilde Courau); still, they embrace the rigid loyalty of family and protect their own against Théo’s teenage volatility. This deft exploration of collusion and complicity is one of the film’s greatest strengths, and it’s deepened by our awareness of Anne’s profession; as soon as her lawyerly knack for defense and denial kicks in, it’s suddenly clear how well these traits lend themselves to the manipulation of those close to her. All of this complicates the eroticism of Anne and Théo’s expressions of desire, making for some of Breillat’s most complex negotiations of power and intimacy to date.
The director explained to me that she wanted to reject the characterization of Anne as a predator, but the narrative is certainly not one of uncomplicated romance; it is all the more intriguing precisely because of the knotty dynamics between the characters and the confidence with which Anne comes to deploy her strengths. Breillat’s aversion to dogmatic visions of society leaves space for varied readings of her films, and the challenges and ambiguities of Last Summer contribute to an especially compelling work.
I spoke with Breillat during the Cannes Film Festival, where Last Summer premiered in competition, about the origins of the project, the provocations of its central relationship, and the evolution of her filmmaking over the last few decades.
NOTEBOOK: I watched your first film, Une vraie jeune fille (1976), for the first time recently and loved it. How do you feel your filmmaking has evolved since the beginning of your career?
CATHERINE BREILLAT: I haven’t evolved that much really, even if obviously for Une vraie jeune fille there were two people working on cameras, and of course I couldn’t do any tracking shots. But apart from that, as I was inspired by hyperrealist painting from the US, it’s precisely framed. All in all, a big part of cinema is framing. I also worked on colors; for example, I painted the blue and beige swimsuit over in pink and black. I did the costumes, I always enjoyed the craft side. And Hiram Keller, I wanted him. From the day I saw him in Fellini’s Satyricon (1969), I said to myself, “I want him to be my actor when I make my first film!” But apart from all this, I didn’t know anything, anything, anything about editing. But in the end, it doesn’t have any importance, because everything edits itself from the moment the sequences gather meaning and emotion. From meaning and emotion we understand whatever we want, and we laugh, and it works.
NOTEBOOK: Where did the idea to remake May el-Toukhy’s film Queen of Hearts come from?
BREILLAT: It wasn't my idea. I met the producer Saïd Ben Saïd at the Belfort Film Festival where he was doing a master class. We were introduced there but then I thought he had forgotten me. I thought that people saw me as being over the hill, a has-been, that people weren't interested in my cinema anymore. So I completely forgot about this and I went home to Portugal after this master class. Three years later, after Belfort, I got a very sweet note from Saïd who said, “I have bought the rights for a Danish film. I'd like to do a remake and I think you could do a better job than the original.” I was overwhelmed by that offer.
Three days after an exchange of emails, Saïd sent me a contract. I was in agreement with everything in the contract except for one clause—the clause stipulated that I would have three months to rewrite the script and I said “No, that's too much, I'll do it in one.” I liked the idea of the density, the urgency that having a short time frame imposes, the energy, the fever. In fact, the job was very simple. Before having breakfast, I would sit down and start writing, and immediately after finishing, even before re-reading what I'd written, I’d send it off to Saïd. Around 11 a.m., I would have to stop because I was famished. Saïd was in agreement with most things. There were some things that he wanted that I refused to do, and that's where [the] ruse comes in, where slyness comes in. The ruse gives you a certain liberty, it gives you wings and allows you to obtain what you want.
Last Summer (Catherine Breillat, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: What were your personal feelings toward the original film and what did you hope to do differently?
BREILLAT: I liked the subject very much. But I disliked, on the one hand, the female protagonist, because in the Danish film, she's a predator and that's not an image that interested me in the portrayal of this woman. I also didn't like the teenager in the film because he didn't have the transparency of teenagers; he didn't have the right skin, the right luster. I did think that the scene of the lie was very strong, where the father rejects what he knows has really happened. The young boy has mentioned very specific details that he couldn't have invented, so the father has to know that it's true, but I love that idea of denial. I love the idea that people reject or hang on to something despite the overwhelming truth.
I like the fact that the lie that’s told in the film could be told as a conscious lie: something that you tell to protect yourself, or as a way of someone actually lying to themselves, which is my approach to the film. This is really what filmmaking is about. In this case, it's a love story. But what I liked so much is the scene between the son and his father. He wants to tell the truth but he's not aware of what he is saying. He's saying one thing, but he wants something else. But I love this idea of having that relationship to truth, and how you can be lying to yourself. The film is about the contemplation of the soul, and what I loved about the actors is that they’re able to show the embodiment of desire, desire incarnate.
It's very funny because after we finished editing the film, my editor and I rewatched the Danish original. We were both stunned because so little had changed—the dialogue was almost identical—and yet the film was completely different. This would be a perfect case to look at in film school because you always hear that it's not the director who counts, it's the script that matters in a project, and here it's absolutely not the case. You have the same scenes, the [same] dialogue, but everything has changed because there's a different gaze, there's a different desire on the part of the director. I said to Saïd, “I’m sorry, I’ve betrayed you. I've given you the opposite from the original.”
NOTEBOOK: How do you view the relationship between, as you describe, the son’s denial of his romantic truth and the perception that other characters may be complicit in a form of abuse?
BREILLAT: I'm not actually certain that it is abusive. It’s he who originally flirts with her, who reaches out to her and who seduces her. It's true that if you're going to give a shorthand version of the story, then yes, it would perhaps sound abusive, but I'm not sure in the film that's really what it's about. The film shows this sense of desire before the characters are in fact aware of it. But her behavior isn't predatory. She sides with him, she creates a link of complicity between the two of them, but it isn't to manipulate him or abuse him. It's rather to support him and to help him, this teenager who's obviously in distress. And what I think is so strong in the film is that the desire is irresistible on both sides. Even as mentioned before, it's not something that they're aware of before the case. It’s something that the audience is aware of, but they themselves aren't aware of when it's happening.
I think this is so pertinent today at a time when we try to impose dogmas, where we have a very Manichean view of guilt and innocence. I think reality and desires are often much more complex. What happens between them is almost innocent and certainly unpremeditated. I'm French so I come from a tradition of Racine’s Phèdre who falls in love with Hippolyte. But I think there's also some of Goethe’s Werther in the film, or for that matter, the boulevard farces of Marivaux which were all about seduction and game playing. And this is what's going on in the film, too. On the one hand, there's the teenage boy who really is flirting because he's enjoying his new power, his new attractiveness, his seductive energy, and feeling what it does to him. But in the same way for Anne, she suddenly comes alive and thinks, “Well, I'm not totally over the hill, I can still interest a younger man.” So this is all, in fact, quite innocent. I see it similarly to Hitchcock's Marnie (1964), in which she's someone who does terrible things, but we forgive her because of her teenage innocence.