French filmmaker Catherine Breillat returns to the Cannes Fest competition with a film that confronts one of the few taboos left, sex between adults and children.
In the past, she has worked with porn stars, and was one of the first to show erection in an arthouse film.
Last Summer is less graphic, but just as disturbing, a middle-aged woman has an affair with her teenage stepson, resulting in the fracturing of a bourgeois family, due to lies, hypocrisy, silence, and betrayal.
Theo (Samuel Kircher) is not a child, although we never learn his exact age. He lounges about his father’s house smoking, gets drunk in bars and brings girls for sex.
Theo is around to do his messy lounging because he has been suspended from school for hitting a teacher. It isn’t clear why he isn’t with his mother rather than the father he has seen only intermittently since childhood.
He also misses social cues, speaks out of turn and, in a very adolescent way, is plain annoying.
When he develops a crush on his stepmother Anne (Lea Drucker), he pursues her with determination.
Theo only has to suggest that Anne come and take a look at the cool video game he is playing on his phone for her to leap at the excuse to snuggle on his bed. It isn’t exactly incest, but it is wrong.
In the first sexual encounter, Breillat focuses on Theo gazing intensely at Anne, his breath catching, his final release joyful. The next time, the focus is on Anne. Her eyes are close. She reaches an ecstasy, which is absent from the amiable sex she has with her husband.
This concentration makes Anne’s subsequent rejection, not only of Theo himself but of the truth of events once there is threat of exposure. To hear a children’s advocate tell a young person that nobody will believe his word against hers – the kind of demeaning dismissal she fights every day on behalf of her clients.
Credits:
Last Summer (L’Eté Dernier)
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Director-screenwriter: Catherine Breillat
Cast: Lea Drucker, Samuel Kircher, Olivier Rabourdin, Clotilde Courau
Running time: 104 minutes
