Written by Tom Augustine.
There’s a secret at the heart of Last Summer, beneath layers and layers of other secrets, that we never see. It’s the key to what drives Anne (Léa Drucker), the wealthy, high-powered lawyer whose story unfolds across 100-minutes, to deeper and deeper levels of depravity as she puts all she has at risk in the name of her forbidden desires. It’s one that we can intuit only through the barest of clues scattered throughout the narrative. What is it that activates Anne’s desire when she comes into contact with her husband’s estranged teenage son Théo (Samuel Kircher)? He’s an impulsive, brash, unfettered creature who crashes into the idyllic upper class life she and her husband have constructed like a bull in a china shop, but point of difference alone is surely not enough to motivate this crossing of the rubicon, this illicit affair into which the two enter. Anne’s legal practice specialises in the protection of abused youth – her clients are almost exclusively young victims of predation. Even as she engages in such an affair, she works to rescue a young teenage girl from an abusive relationship with her father – one, it’s implied, that isn’t that far divorced from the one in which she’s currently conducting herself. Contradiction, denial, delusion. In a pivotal scene, Théo records an interview with Anne using a tape recorder, a playful act at the height of their secret union. He asks about her first time – she immediately goes rigid, and refuses to go there. That’s as much as we’re given; but a few leaps in logic, and suddenly the entire puzzle snaps into place.
Catherine Breillat, a filmmaker whose work is often too easily dismissed as ‘provocative’, is utterly merciless in her pursuit of truth (sans moralising), but that certainly does not mean her work is emotionally cold. Her first film in ten years, Last Summer is an adaptation of a Danish film called Queen of Hearts, and could quite easily be classified as pure melodrama if not for the almost clinically sterile environment her characters find themselves in, a note-perfect approximation of the tasteful blandness of the bourgeoisie. Tonally, it lacks the most histrionic notes of that other great sexual drama of 2023, Todd Haynes’ May December, but is still a work of extreme emotional brutality, opening the Pandora’s Box that lies within its central character, buried somewhere between her pulsating desire and the rigorous intellectual control that she exerts upon herself. In Breillat’s worlds, no one is entirely exempt from judgement, nor entirely undeserving of sympathy. Last Summer is not a scorched earth excoriation of the privileged class – that would be too easy – but neither could one plausibly divorce the supreme idyllic comfort of their lives from the type of ruination Anne brings forth. Contradiction, denial, delusion.
In her first film in ten years, daring French auteur Catherine Breillat ferociously demolishes wealthy liberal scenes of comfortable domesticity in this exceptional, emotionally brutal erotic drama. Led by an astonishing performance by Léa Drucker, it’s a film whose glassy, clinical surface conceals roiling currents beneath.
It all makes for a hard, often tetchy viewing experience, one whose jagged, raw observations of human nature cannot be obscured by the tastefulness of the shooting style or the art direction. At the heart of the story is a remarkable performance from Léa Drucker, whose internal machinations can be tracked through a slight parting of the lips or a single tremulous eye movement. Drucker has been a consistent feature of the French arthouse for a long time now, with New Zealand viewers most likely to recognise her from Lukas Dhont’s Close – though I am most enamoured with her for her superb work in Xavier Legrand’s terrifying Custody, a chilly divorce drama that suddenly slides into exploitation horror with nerve-shredding agility. For the quality of her work in those films, under Breillat’s direction she’s another thing entirely, turning in one of the finest performances of the decade thus far. Drucker imbues Anne with both a heartrending fragility and an unsettling steeliness, warning us that this is not a story in which her character will always be the one we side with, even before her semi-incestuous underage paramour enters the picture. In her role as an attorney, Anne has become accustomed to the tells of human nature, which she uses to both champion her young female clients’ cases when they face male courtroom interrogators, and later to finesse the consciences of both Théo and his hapless, obtuse father Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) to gain an ideological upper hand.
Breillat launches us headfirst into the love affair, tracing the gently erotic courtship of the two as Pierre is often away absent, working. Sequences of movement – driving, mostly, but also a scene of youthful abandon as Anne rides on the back of Théo’s motorised scooter – are frequently scored by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, as canny a pairing of director and musician as I can imagine, and which add an affect of effortless cool to proceedings. Breillat’s steady hand ensures the transition of this relationship, from gleeful undercover trysts to quickly curdling toxicity, occurs so naturally that one barely sees the seams. This is conducted in parallel with Théo’s crumbling self-assurance. The two are locked in a fascinating power battle, though who ultimately holds the cards is never really in doubt. Kircher plays Théo with an aching, innocent swagger, tearing the facade away gradually to reveal the child within with devastating exactitude. What’s most horrifying about Last Summer is the tragic knowledge in Anne’s eyes the split-second before she makes her decisions, in which she becomes conscious of her own enactment of abuse, her own moral failing, before doing it anyway. There’s a remoteness, a glassiness to Anne, as though she doesn’t seem to be able to locate exactly why she does anything she does beyond animalistic instinct – first to claim what she wants, then to preserve her delicately constructed nest.
Last Summer’s masterstroke is that we can only theorise as to what motivates Anne, even as the film descends upon its spiritually harrowing finale, landing on a final image of such staggering metaphorical gravity that its lonely gleam echoed through my mind for an entire year between my first and second watches. In the end, even more than an examination of abuse, Last Summer comes to be an examination of denial, of useful fictions and utter delusions constructed in order to maintain the equilibrium of a carefully calibrated world of civility. Anne feels like people we know – there are more than a few upper class Aucklanders who she draws direct parallels to, and this comes to amplify the great strength of Breillat as a filmmaker – her absolute commitment to follow the recognisable failings of human nature to their lowest depths. Last Summer is, naturally, an incredibly French work of cinema. One can’t imagine an American, British or Kiwi picture with this level of moral ambiguity being made, much less championed. And yet it is that fealty to exploring genuinely adult topics, and bearing forth answers of uneasy complexity to its audience, that makes Last Summer one of the best films of the year.
Last Summer is in cinemas now.
Last Summer

Movie title: Last Summer (Breillat, 2023)
Movie description: In her first film in ten years, daring French auteur Catherine Breillat ferociously demolishes wealthy liberal scenes of comfortable domesticity in this exceptional, emotionally brutal erotic drama. Led by an astonishing performance by Léa Drucker, it’s a film whose glassy, clinical surface conceals roiling currents beneath.
Date published: October 17, 2024
Country: France
Author: Catherine Breillat, Pascal Bonitzer, Maren Louise Käehne
Director(s): Catherine Breillat
Actor(s): Léa Drucker, Samuel Kircher, Olivier Rabourdin
Genre: Drama, Thriller
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Movie Rating