“Last Summer” (2023) is Catherine Breillat’s most recent film, and her first film in ten years. It is a French language remake of the Danish film “Queen of Hearts” (2019). Anne (Lea Drucker) is a lawyer who specializes in cases involving vulnerable young women, the sister of nail tech, Mina (Clotilde Courau), aunt to Mina’s son, Lucas (Romain Maricau), the second wife of successful, affluent Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), and mother to two adopted Asian girls Serena (Serena Hu) and Angela (Angela Chen). When assigned the additional role of stepmother to Theo (Samuel Kircher), Pierre’s rebellious seventeen-year-old son from his first marriage, she fails spectacularly and secretly as they spend more time together and have an affair. Will they get caught and who will this discovery destroy?

“Last Summer” could refer to a couple of things: Theo’s last summer as a child before he is free to pursue a life without parental supervision or it could refer to the season of Anne’s life, her last summer before the fall begins and she begins the inevitable and inexorable creep to the grave. Anne is at the height of her power at the beginning of the film. Donning white dress suits, she moves easily to intercept the glare of the spotlight for her young clients before returning to her life of comfort on the countryside with a solid routine of going on long walks, listening to her husband complain and driving the girls to their extracurricular activities. Like any teenager, Theo disrupts this routine and her spacious home by leaving his stuff everywhere and walking around shirtless like Axl in “The Middle.”

While Theo and his father have a turbulent relationship, his little sisters adore him, and he is a good big brother. The main uncertainty lies in his relationship with Anne. Is she an adult who can discipline and care for him? Is he someone who plays a more active role in the family than his father, so Anne confuses his company for companionship? Does he remind her of a carefree younger life that she never had and is less stuffy and more visceral than her current one? Are they just having fun or beginning to fall for each other? Or is she a predator and is Theo a victim? Or is Theo the flirt advancing a hedonistic agenda on the otherwise straitlaced Anne? Interestingly Breillat never considers Theo’s actions as a form of revenge against his father. “Last Summer” toys with all these other possibilities, but Americans are notably stricter in theory than the French in these matters and will land on regardless of what Theo did, Anne should have behaved better and is an amoral perv. Breillat succeeds at portraying the situation with little to no judgment even when things fall apart under the stress of outside scrutiny. It is worth noting that in France, the age of consent is fifteen years old, so the real taboo is incest[1], not Theo’s age. Even though they are not blood relations, Anne’s marriage makes her family and bestows her with more responsibility than if she was any other older woman.

For those unfamiliar with Breillat’s work, she is considered edgy, and her movies are usually taboo breaking in some way. Here Breillat plays with female ruthless sexuality, age, incestuous implications, but even television shows do not flinch at the idea of incest between blood relatives. IMDb has a specific keyword phrase category, “wife cheats on husband with his son” and “stepmother stepson sex.”  The biggest taboo is age difference between lovers, and even that issue is not as earth shattering a subject for movies to tackle. After watching “Last Summer,” if you read a spoiler summary of “Queen of Hearts,” the Danish story seems more merciless than Breillat’s take on the original. After films like “May December” (2023), which addresses an older woman preying on an adolescent boy for the rest of his life, and the rise of critically acclaimed, radical yet accepted filmmakers like Yorgos Lanthimos who use explicit sex and nudity to tell his stories, Breillat seems comparatively safe. Breillat may be entering “Sunset Boulevard” territory and reply, “I am big! It’s the pictures that got small,” but just like Norma Desmond did not recognize that the world moved on without her, it appears that although Breillat is still a revered pioneer, she is no longer the most shocking of them all. She pushed the envelope, and now every new director has run away with it.

The intersection between death and sex feels like such a given that as the sisters and later Anne play fight with Theo, it is easy to wait for the other shoe to drop, and Theo to wind up dead either from the accidental roughhousing or in a foreboding violent rage at Pierre’s hands if dad was not such a soft touch. Breillat still pushes boundaries with extended, unedited scenes that linger for so long on a thrown back head in ecstasy that it almost seems abstract, not passionate and focus on the heavy breathing long after the coupling ends. Her blocking of characters is deliberately stylized, not naturalistic. People more often sit side-by-side than facing each other so the camera can focus on the dynamic. During certain scenes, Breillat only focuses on one character’s reaction and not often the person talking. She pulls punches elsewhere.

Throughout “Last Summer,” Theo is a logistics problem for a year because he is still a child who needs adult care. He is resistant to acting as if he is a child and winds up in Pierre’s home because he has run out of education options in Geneva where his mother lives. During the final act, this problem evaporates as he roams around erratically while desperate to be simultaneously consoled as a lover and child. The final act feels oblique and unfinished in a way that seems realistic but also too pat in terms of who remains superficially unscathed and who does not. The original text reads as a more definitive text albeit life is messier.

Breillat deserves kudos for offering a slice of information about Anne without prose dumping to maintain some mystery. Drucker keeps her inscrutable so there is always a question of intent. There is a great, low stakes scene where Pierre confronts Anne about leaving a garden party early, and Anne mischievously goes on the offensive. It sets up the dynamic that in this family, she is above certain standards while willing to maintain a superficial veneer of appropriateness. Pierre may be a financial necessity, but she is the decisionmaker in that family.

Drucker was not originally cast as Anne, but she masters the role as if she was the first choice by furtively calculating danger and risk before course correcting to act normal. Kircher’s older brother, Paul, originally had the role of Theo, and the younger Kircher seems inseparable from the character. At times he is so vacant, it feels impossible to act that way. By the end, Kircher’s performance seamlessly changes from the nonchalant teen who is above it all to a gutted kid alone at sea. Rabourdin has a tough role to play because Pierre could lose sympathy and become hateful because his role is one of betrayal to his wife or son depending on which road he takes. In the end, he takes the emotional journey from the dominating man of the house to a relatable pathetic puppet and weathervane.

Without the ensemble cast’s chemistry and pitch perfect performances, “Last Summer” falls apart. Breillat avoids melodrama thanks to her years of avoiding conventional tropes. While Breillat may no longer be the most merciless director of them all, she has not lost a beat when it comes to rising above archetypes and offering flawed and fascinating characters. Humanity is bewildering and complex.

[1] Penal Code Article 222-22-3: “Rape and sexual assault are considered incestuous when committed by:

1° An ascendant;

2° A brother, sister, uncle, aunt, great-uncle, great-aunt, nephew or niece;

3° The spouse, common-law partner of one of the persons mentioned in 1° and 2° or the partner bound by a civil solidarity pact to one of the persons mentioned in the same 1° and 2°, if he or she has legal or de facto authority over the victim.”