The pitch is very simple: what happens when a fifty-year-old is seduced by her seventeen-year-old stepson? Are we going to see a new version of Dying to Love or Souffle au coeur? No way. Announced at the last Cannes Film Festival as a sulphurous, disturbing film, Last Summer by Catherine Breillat did not trigger controversy, other than some good reviews from her fans and yawns from others.
Ten years after Abuse of Weakness about her toxic relationship with the crook Christophe Rocancourt, the 75-year-old filmmaker signs a classic drama, a remake of a Danish film never released in France. It’s about desire, adolescence, transgression and sex, a familiar area that the director has continued to explore since 36 Fillette and Romance, with Rocco Siffredi.
In a few scenes, the scene is set: a bourgeois house in which live Anne (Léa Drucker), a lawyer specializing in the defense of minor victims of abuse, her husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), a businessman who is often absent , and their two adopted daughters (Serena Hu and Angela Chen). All that’s missing is the disruptive element to launch the plot: Théo (Samuel Kircher, revealed in Le Lycéen by Christophe Honoré), a rebellious teenager, born from Pierre’s first marriage.
With his false airs of Tadzio from Death in Venice, he quickly sows trouble among his mother-in-law who is bored and drinks a lot of white wine. All it takes is a scooter ride and a few beers to succumb to its charm. The rest allows Catherine Breillat to film them as closely as possible in the love scenes, long, repetitive, examining with her camera the dizziness of a woman who abandons herself to guilty pleasure, her body in a trance, her head thrown back, eyes closed. No doubt, she seeks to explore the mystery of desire in her heroine, this taste for the forbidden, to probe the ravages of deadly passion and what follows.
This attempt to analyze the inexplicable in images is a little perplexing, especially since the production is very shot-to-shot and the dialogues are often flat. In other words, we look in vain for suspense in the not very new equation of Post coitum, a sad animal when, in a croquignolesque scene, Léa Drucker recounts juicy episodes from her childhood to her husband who violently knocks her down.
Likewise, we look in vain for scandal, true or false, in this love at first sight between this woman and this teenager which goes beyond good and evil. But chase away morality, it comes back at a gallop and ends up with the judge. Instead of surprising, Catherine Breillat serves up a bourgeois drama, which does not go off the beaten track of adultery, banal, classic. Lacking a solid plot and credible twists and turns, Last Summer is slipping. In the genre, we prefer Claude Chabrol, mocking critic of the failings of the bourgeoisie and the couple.
What remains is the portrait of a fragile, manipulative woman who discovers her own monstrosity when it comes to saving her life, her relationship, her career, her little comfort. Léa Drucker lives up to her character. She carries Last Summer and sets the tempo for the film, which is no small feat.
Last summer, indoors.
