Catherine Breillat’s story of forbidden love will slide under your skin

Director Catherine Breillat’s provocative remake of 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts brings together an older woman and a teenager to explore transgressive love.

Theo (Samuel Kircher) and Anne (Lea Drucker) in Last Summer.

French film-maker and novelist Catherine Breillat has long been interested in female sexuality and an associated breaking of taboos.

Sexually explicit films such as Romance (1999) and Anatomy of Hell (2004) focus on women who resist convention. She also considers how male transgressions are normalised and female ones are pathologised.

The erotic drama Last Summer, her first film in a decade, continues this exploration. It opens with the main character, Anne (Lea Drucker), who is a lawyer, advising a young woman who is an alleged victim of sexual assault.

“When you are questioned,’’ she says, “always tell the truth.” It’s a line to be remembered when Anne’s life takes unconventional turn of her own making.

Anne and her businessman husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), live in the Paris suburbs with their pre-teen adopted daughters. They are wealthy but it’s clear something is missing.

When, after making love, Pierre muses that Anne is still with an “old man” like him, she jokes that she’s a gerontophile, another comment that will linger in the mind.

Everything changes when Pierre’s 17-year-old son from his first marriage moves into the family home. Theo (Samuel Kircher in an impressive film debut) is tall, lean and handsome in a Timothee Chalamet sort of way.

He’s also shirtless a lot of the time. It is, as the title suggests, summer. “Haven’t you grown,’’ Anne remarks when he emerges towel-clad from the shower. Read into that what you will.

He has a casual lover, Amanda (Nelia Da Costa). When Anne asks if she’s his girlfriend, he laughs off her “mum-speak” and adds, “She has her life, I have mine. Feelings are not my thing.”

Theo’s non-feelings and Anne’s truth-telling are more or less chucked out the window when they start an affair. The director uses long takes to show their slow, awkward, yet inevitable coming together.

The two stars deliver subtly superb performances. He’s a cocky young man who is less arrogant that he pretends to be; she’s a smart, attractive older woman with a damaged past that we learn only a little about.

The sex is straightforward. It’s what happens afterwards that matters.

The director holds the shot on Anne’s face as she lies in bed. Whether the sex was good, bad or average, it’s clearly taken her to another place.

At one point she mentions her “vertigo theory”. She does not have a fear of falling but “a fear of the irresistible urge to fall”. That potential plummet will come if she and Theo’s affair is discovered, which seems as inevitable as its beginning.

This provocative drama is a remake of the 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts. Like all of the director’s work, it crawls under the skin and opens a lot of questions.

When stepmother and stepson first kiss, he’s the one who makes the move but she does not resist. That’s the overwhelming question: Why? By the end of this thought-provoking film, viewers will come to a few answers of their own.

Last Summer (MA15+)

French language with English subtitles
104 minutes
In cinemas

★★★½