Last Summer

(L’Été dernier, Catherine Breillat, France, 2023)

Play It As It Lays

When I was about 15 years old, I read a description by Ian Cameron of a scene-transition in Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966) that really impressed and stuck with me. It occurs very early on, when two children beg their recalcitrant father to bring a young donkey home with them. “No!” is his reply. But the next shot shows him dutifully dragging the beast home, as the kids make merry. A contrary, paradoxical effect follows straight on from its cause, contradicting it – and instantly bridging whatever realistically needed to happen in-between in order to bring about this reversal. This leap in logic is pure cinema! It can’t be done even half as effectively on a page or a stage.

The same skip happens in a split-second of Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer. Teenage devil Théo (Samuel Kircher, son of Irène Jacob) keeps encouraging his sexy stepmother, Anne (Léa Drucker), to let him give her a real tattoo: piercing, ink and all. No, no, she replies, over and again. Next shot: close up of Anne’s cubital fossa (I had to look up that body part) getting stabbed for an inscription.

The urgency of the cut, and the close-up, matter-of-fact savagery of the detail: all Breillat is there. In the comparison of Last Summer with its source, the Danish film Queen of Hearts (2019) – I pursue the details further in my review of the latter – one is immediately struck by the astonishing condensation of the material to flashes, highpoints of intensity. It starts right in, for instance, with tight (even awkwardly top-chopping) close-ups of serious and agonised faces. There’s very little conventional scene-setting of the type that fills, TV-style, May el-Toukhy’s original. This is the Maurice Pialat, lightning-in-a-bottle side of Breillat.

But is there, in fact, any other side to her cinema? Breillat’s films do not call for interpretation: everything they are is right there, on the surface. They are about emotions, the mystery of psychology and drives, obscure interpersonal shifts and arrangements. They are elevated ‘relationship dramas’ in the tradition of Ingmar Bergman. There’s nothing hidden, nothing allegorical in them, beyond some vastly generalised plane of gender or … humanity! (And it’s hard to get any more general than that.)

When there are references, allusions or quotations underpinning the work, she tends to lay them out directly – just look at all the paintings, prints and upturned book covers in the frame, for starters. “I always give out the keys to my films!”, as she exclaims to Murielle Joudet in the splendid interview book Je ne crois qu’en moi (Capricci, 2023), citing Léa’s little soliloquy to Théo on the true meaning of vertigo: it’s the temptation to jump, rather than the fear of falling. Hitchcock only got close to that ultimate ring of the vertigo complex …

That kind of consciousness – if not exactly rationality! – is key to Breillat’s art. When you watch something like Anatomy of Hell (2004), it’s hard to imagine that any of the desiring itches on display have not been thoroughly, systematically, philosophically thought through by the maker, in her art as in her life. Her characters, too, commit some important acts, and take some significant decisions, in an extremely lucid, hyperconscious manner.

Breillat has stated that the attraction of Queen of Hearts, when producer Saïd Ben Saïd (who had bought the remake rights) presented it to her as a project after a 10-year absence from filmmaking, was not in the May-December relationship per se (she’d dramatised that herself already in Brief Crossing [2001]) – even with the quasi-incestuous angle added in! – but the fact that Anne so calmly denies it. And keeps on doing so, to the point that not only is Théo driven to a kind of madness, but also the husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), colludes (in the extraordinary final, somewhat Chabrolian/Ducournaun moments) in the ambient hush-hush: his last line is tais-toi, shut up. So, this isn’t denial in the Freudian sense of psychic repression and disavowal; it’s a fully conscious decision to play it as it lays.

I wonder, though, whether there is just one intriguing, unspoken symptom underlying what goes on, and the intense way it’s presented, in Last Summer. There’s a thread in cinema history – so-called ‘art cinema’, in particular – of unnerved, even hysterically-tinged films made by writer-directors who have faced (and usually lost under) the hammer of the Law. Getting entangled by litigation (I can attest) constitutes a special (and especially corrosive) form of soul murder, where the questioning of one’s integrity (moral, financial, ideological, whatever) by another and by the State leads inevitably to a bottomless vertigo of self-doubt.

This is the case, for instance, with R.W. Fassbinder’s loony Satan’s Brew (1976), made in the wake of the plagiarism case concerning Martha (1974); and J.-C. Brisseau’s Exterminating Angels (2006), hinging on the sexual harassment/abuse trial that effectively derailed his career. With Breillat, there is less a specific whammy of this sort than a near-lifetime of censorship battles, and (more recently) the need to contend with the retrospective accusations laid against her by the lead actor in Romance (1999), Caroline Ducey (this juicy matter absorbs many pages of Je ne crois qu’en moi). No wonder one of her pet projects, at this point, is a treatment of the “story of Asia Argento with Weinstein” (on which she has been outspoken) currently titled MeToo, She Said!

As in Queen of Hearts, Anne is a lawyer who supports victims of sexual abuse; both films begin with her grilling a teenage client who is likely to suffer her ‘promiscuity’ being paraded and probed in court. A later figure in the margins of the drama is another, younger girl who eventually escapes from the domestic clutches of a drunken parental figure (whose violence is left to be inferred by us). What is this ‘off-screen’ haunting Last Summer? It has less to do, I suspect, with topical ‘social issues’ than with a situation of permanent friction between dictates and procedures of law, versus the realm of bottomless, unpredictable, personal desire – and especially, what this friction does to a general life-imperative to truth-tell. Existentialist authenticity, here, takes second place to the practical efficacy of cool denial …

Except, that is, for Théo. Where in Queen of Hearts the boy is (and stays) a pretty normal, gormless, uninteresting teen, Breillat invests her young hero with a Pasolinian glow (à la Teorema, 1968) and a ferocious twinkle. He experiences not a ‘loss of innocence’ (he probably wasn’t terribly innocent to begin with) but a primal, first passion – and a first, shattering heartbreak. Théo’s way to process all that, astonishingly enough, is to wield the law, and make Anne pay up to avoid a public/professional scandal. It is truly a hot mess!

When Kircher lets the tears flow, mixed with the character’s scorching anger, I recalled Breillat’s provocative commentary (from 2018) on some real-life sexual abuse charges stemming from “bitterness”, which “can lead people to denounce if you wanted to obtain something and you didn’t obtain it, if you feel humiliated”. In Last Summer, Théo cannot bear (among other things) the blatant hypocrisy of the adult world as it affronts both his desiring need and his righteous rage. He is simply (or complexly) stunned that the truth cannot be stated, either in private or public.

There’s always been a difficult-to-define narrative process in Breillat’s work, somewhere between ‘individual characters with a psychology you can speculate on’ and ‘figures who have a purely cinematic existence’. Certainly, the actors – Drucker, Kircher and Rabourdin are all fantastic here, as are, in their utter naturalness, the pair of little, adopted, gorgeous kids who apparently filled much more of the rough cut – completely inhabit their parts (and their bodies), projecting/expressing anything the director calls on them to do (a working process which is apparently not exactly a picnic: Breillat proudly conveys to Joudet Isabelle Huppert’s deadpan verdict that she is “worse to work with than Pialat”!). Ela Bittencourt (who has recently written a persuasive defense of Abuse of Weakness, 2013) places Anne in the Breillatian tradition of women who are “mysteries to themselves”, in this specific case driven by the hinted-at “spectre of [an] unfulfilled youthful dream of a perfect union” (Sight and Sound, May 2024). Hence the end-credits song, which could be about Théo or Anne or both: Léo Ferré’s 1961 “Vingt ans” (‘20 years old’).

Whatever our depth-sounding on this level, these characters are, at the film’s surface, magnificent creatures of desire, losing themselves in incandescent moments of attraction and ecstasy. Last Summer is among Breillat’s best films in this regard. A wonderful moment early on fleetingly shows Théo with his presumed girlfriend (or fuck-buddy) Amanda: she is, in every respect of her costume and physical bearing, teen-eroticism incarnate, a fact which is not lost on Anne-as-spectator (compare the same incident in Queen of Hearts, which plays it safe, mundane and ‘respectful’, thus lacking that charge). In altogether another register, the narrative unfolding surprises us with the immediate, evident warmth between Théo and his step-sisters. Breillat reveals herself to be a master of the frolic scene, which is indeed one of the hardest things to direct and depict in cinema.

The sex scenes – particularly those between Anne and Théo – reveal one of the major stylistic strategies at work: to refuse us the expected, conventional counter-shots, to just keep the camera close on him or on her. (Breillat insists that the camera angle is always her hungry look of love upon these flaming screen-presences, dressed, undressed, lit and posed in conscious or unconscious homage to various great paintings – beauty is always the aim.) There’s nothing in el-Toukhy’s version that’s anything like this. Revel in what Breillat does (for instance) with the intense breathing of lovers during and after the act! It’s really something.

Stylistic notes: the slow, semi-circular, long-take tracking shots around which Breillat organised complex staging so brilliantly in the era of Fat Girl (2001) is absent now; this film has a more fragmented, elliptical progression that heightens its paroxysmic emotions (the Pialat affinity again). Also: in stark contrast to the (deliberately) glacial frigidity of Abuse of Weakness, there’s an occasional blast of refreshing, electrified music on the soundtrack (courtesy of Breillat fan Kim Gordon and Body/Head) that’s reminiscent of a similar window-opening effect in Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep (1996).

I’ll confess that, at the point of The Last Mistress (2007), I largely disconnected from Breillat’s work – which I had admired enormously up until then. That film, and the three that followed, struck me as weakly or uncertainly realised on many levels, as if Breillat had lost her gift as a director. I may need to go back and take a re-look at them in the light of Last Summer, rather than reach for the journalistic cliché of hailing a return to form!

Whatever the case – and whatever the future holds for the now 75-year-old Breillat – Last Summer is a film to celebrate.

© Adrian Martin 25 April 2024