A woman, her stepson and the film that shocked France

Catherine Breillat is 75. Twenty years ago, she had a stroke that paralysed part of her body. That didn’t stop her from making films and it didn’t mean that the films she made were any less shocking. In the past, in films such as 36 Fillette (1988) and Fat Girl (2001), she has laid bare the sexual stirrings in pubescent girls; in Romance (1999) she broke barriers by casting porn star Rocco Siffredi in an acting role that included unsimulated sex.

“There are certain things that are forbidden for women,” Breillat once explained of her movies. “I want to show these things, explore them beyond their limits … If you consider that this is a provocation, this is what I do.”

What is forbidden and with what sense of urgency, of course, changes with the times. Right now, adults who exploit the sexuality of children are our chosen monsters, which must have made the story of Last Summer irresistible to an artist as forensically analytical as Breillat.

The film centres on Anne, a successful, immaculately chic middle-aged lawyer (Léa Drucker) who slips into a passionate affair with her husband’s truculent, troubled teenage son Theo (Samuel Kircher). It isn’t exactly incest, but she is effectively ripping up the family contract in which she took on the mother’s part. Anne specialises in representing abused children in court. If anyone found out what she was doing, she would be finished. In her haze of desire, she doesn’t seem to care.

Last Summer is a remake of Queen of Hearts, a Danish film starring Trine Dyrholm. Queen of Hearts came out in 2019 but it didn’t scare the horses in anything like the way Breillat’s film stirred up Cannes, even though the storylines are the same. Breillat’s version is certainly more swooning, which suggests that it is her romanticism about this liaison that is the true outrage. There is no suggestion of moral outrage in this melange of sunshine, lush gardens, deliciously shadowed interiors and beautiful people whose sexual encounters are shown almost entirely – and at length – through close-ups of their ecstatic faces.

When French producer Saïd Ben Saïd approached her to make it, Breillat says, she determined that even though she intended sticking to the story, it should not feel like a remake. “The challenge was to appropriate the film, to take out the things that weren’t my style. In general, I pulled towards more emotion,” she said later. “The Danish film was quite cold. First and foremost, the thing I wanted to get away from was the raw and explicit sexual content because, contrary to public opinion, unless that’s the subject, it’s not something I handle. And that the woman not be a predatory woman, because a predatory woman is not something I know or understand.”

Female predators may exist, she shrugs. “But I don’t want to show it on screen. I am more interested in how people tell lies: lies to other people to manipulate them or lies to themselves to keep themselves on track.” It was also important to her, however, that Theo be both inappropriately young and the instigator of the affair.

“I’m from France, I come from the country of Phedre, of Marivaux, of bedroom farces. I liked ... exploring the idea that perhaps it was the young boy who flirts and tries playfully to seduce his stepmother. In French terms, it would be called a dangerous seduction.”

Samuel Kircher, Catherine Breillat and Léa Drucker in Cannes.Credit: Corbis via Getty Images

When Breillat was herself 17, she wrote a novel called A Man for the Asking that was deemed so indecent that it could not be sold to under-18s, meaning that Breillat couldn’t buy a copy of her own book. Much later, as a fan of the cinema of Spanish provocateur Luis Bunuel (whose Belle du Jour, 1967, starring Catherine Deneuve as a bourgeois trophy wife who spends her afternoons moonlighting as a prostitute, is clearly an antecedent for her own accounts of female sexual adventurism), she slid sideways into film as an actor, playing a bit part in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972).

Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris.

Bertolucci’s film created a furore at the time, with its portrayal of brutal anal sex and generally sordid atmosphere; decades later, the director was accused of humiliating the young lead actor Maria Schneider, effectively destroying her career. Breillat’s experience was presumably more positive; it was her springboard into making her first film as director, A Real Young Girl (1976), adapted from her third novel.

Unfortunately for her, its sexual explicitness meant it was subject to a new tax on adult films and the producer dropped it from release; nobody saw it until 25 years later, when the success of Romance stirred interest in Breillat’s previous work. Her troubles as a self-styled pariah had begun but, as she once said: “All true artists are hated. Only the conformists are ever adored.”

Not that Breillat has ever operated in a vacuum; she works within a strong tradition of defiantly extreme or offensive cinema within Europe that was especially vigorous around the time she was working for Bertolucci. Pier Paolo Pasolini, the gay, communist director of such disturbing films as Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) was a beacon for her. Salo, which included scenes of rape and coprophagy, was banned in Australia on and off until 2011.

Polish iconoclast Walerian Borowczyk’s mix of politics, literary intellectualism and sexual explicitness in films such as Immoral Tales (1973) and Behind Convent Walls (1978), memorable for its gleefully masturbating nuns, shares with her work a determination to break the rules. Where Borowczyk was extravagant and baroque, however, Breillat leaned towards grunge. As a feminist writing about female desire, she wasn’t inclined towards making historical spectacles. She was more interested in telling visceral, generally unspoken truths about girls and their desires.

Female desire of any kind remains a subject largely beyond discussion, according to publications from women’s glossies to professional journals. “Men have been taught about pleasure through formal education, the media, and society as a whole for their entire lives, while female pleasure is rarely acknowledged,” lamented Harper’s Bazaar in 2020. “Even language shows a male bias, with a lack of a female equivalent for the word virility.”

Evidence for this thesis piles up wherever you look. Popular culture assumes that all men masturbate, which is why it is allowed to be funny: think of the scene in There’s Something About Mary (1998) where Ben Stiller opens his door to Cameron Diaz, unaware he has semen dangling from one earlobe – while women’s masturbation, if it is referenced at all, is perverse or gross. A woman’s body is not an autonomous locus of pleasure, particularly once it starts to sag. Older women expressing any kind of lust make themselves ridiculous.

Kim Cattrall in Sex and the City.Credit: Getty

That particular taboo was tackled quite valiantly in Sex and the City (1998-2004), in which Kim Cattrall’s character was both menopausal and sexually rampant. A quarter of a century later, however, it remains an outlier. Anyway, Samantha wasn’t sagging; nobody in that series felt real, which meant that nothing they did or felt seemed real. And a glamorous older woman remains suspect in a way that a man is not: the cougar is a very different beast from the silver fox. She is a schemer, a witch. Like her four-footed namesake, she is a predator.

The dour irony in Last Summer is that Lea Drucker’s Anne is able to use her age, status and influence over Theo – not to push him into sex, but to keep him in his place when sex threatens the social order. Theo may be the “agent of desire”, as Breillat puts it, but as a professional, respected, moneyed bourgeois woman, Anne has agency over everything else. The director says she is not interested in exposing the discreet depravity of the bourgeoisie. She deals with the educated middle class because they have more time to indulge in their feelings and the language to express them.

Léa Drucker, Olivier Rabourdin (who plays her husband, Pierre) and Samuel Kircher in Last Summer.Credit: Potential Films

“The bourgeoisie is my background; that’s what I know,” she says. “What I feel passion for is life, the diversity of human emotion and seeing that on screen.” Nevertheless, it is the ability of the dominant class to repair its own ruptures, thus maintaining its dominance, that drives the story and defines its characters.

It will be interesting to see whether Last Summer’s breach of sexual mores seems so outre in 10 years’ time; whether, as our primary taboos shift, its impact is reduced to a merely problematic infraction and some other abomination takes its place. For Breillat, everything is in flux; anyone could make the same mistake Anne does.

“If you were asked you would say no, I shouldn’t do this – but you’re a victim of yourself, a victim of being overcome by this emotion,” she says. “Passion is magnificent, you have to allow yourself passion otherwise life has no interest. We have to allow ourselves these jagged edges, these impure thoughts. I’m always worried about the fascism latent in good intentions. Life is more complex than that.”

Last Summer opens in cinemas on September 5.