A maverick filmmaker smashes the ‘believe all women’ canard.
Anne (Léa Drucker) — the tall, blonde, strong-willed family-court attorney whose specialty is cases of sexual abuse of minors in Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer — is one of the most extraordinary Millennial movie characters. She’s a hypocrite who not only contradicts her professional ethics, she also violates the vows of her marriage and private life. Yet she’s Breillat’s heroine, the strongest film performance so far this year and the latest in a series of sexual adventurers seen in Breillat’s maverick art-movies (Romance, Fat Girl, Sex Is Comedy, and her revisionist Bluebeard and Sleeping Beauty tales).
Breillat is the original, proto-feminist artist that dumb reviewers mistakenly believe Jane Campion to be. (Blame The Piano and The Power of the Dog.) In Last Summer, Breillat’s first movie in a decade, she remakes Queen of Hearts (2019), by Danish-Egyptian filmmaker May el-Toukhy, but she does it in her own strange way.
Last Summer demands attention for Breillat’s bravery in challenging the “believe all women” canard. Deceitful Anne has an affair with Théo (Samuel Kircher), her 17-year-old stepson. She then denies the infidelity in court and to her husband. Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin). Anne’s private code is mysterious and off-putting in ways that make us look right in the face at the deceit of contemporary female charlatans.
Anne’s bourgeois status and personal confidence are clearly layered in Drucker’s portrayal. Her sophistication includes her frank sexual awareness about loving Pierre, defining herself as a “gerontophile,” and saying that she’s attracted to Théo’s “pre-corpse” matured body. The fascination with the teenage boy doesn’t fit her résumé. Anne likens her new lust to “vertigo” — she jumps into danger as a response to fear. Is she crazy, or is Breillat?
Anne’s boldness is almost a farcical study of what’s known as a “Karen,” those social hypocrites whose self-justification is the last refuge of narcissists. In response to #MeToo, Tammy Bruce, former president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization of Women, said, “Feminism is having a nervous breakdown.” Feminism has made most of the new viragos and harpies of our time (Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Christine Blasey Ford, Susan Rice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Cassidy Hutchinson, Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, and the congressional “Squad” members Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Tlaib). Breillat thinks differently than American feminists do: “I’m French, and we have a very different approach to film and life. . . . France is the country of Musset and Marivaux!” she told film journalist Beatrice Loayza. “What interested me was the lie. Denial has been a force in all of my films.”
Visually, Last Summer contradicts Anne’s lie; adoring, POV portrait studies of Théo share Anne’s leering interest. The female-nude painting hanging over her conjugal bed satirizes a freaky tendency that rocks her marital arrangement — an unsettling tour de force from Breillat. It reveals that some respected, socially assured women don’t really know themselves. Behind Anne’s front, she’s vile. Denying her complicity with Théo, Anne tells him, “You’re not credible.” She buries the truth and then threatens him: “Grin and bear it.”
This is feminist revenge, but not how American politicians and journalists wield it. (The final scene of cold, sexual deceit shows Anne clenching keys in her fist.) “Anne is not a predator. I had no interest in demonstrating a predatory woman who simply takes on this stereotypically masculine way of desiring,” Breillat tells Loayza. “There’s a difference between giving in to something and taking it.”
The surprise of Last Summer — maybe its shock — is that Breillat uses Anne to go beyond obvious political messaging. She smashes that glass ceiling (a protective cloche) under which most feminist filmmakers operate. There’s radicalism in her film’s ironic title, in contrast to Todd Haynes’s May December, which recently attempted to justify the pedophilia of Mary Kay Letourneau, the teacher in the famous American criminal case. But Breillat is more artful, cerebral, and honest (she’s a student of trailblazers Pasolini and Bertolucci), and she’s given modern feminism what it has refused to admit: a new form of guilt.