Last Summer
L'été dernier

Catherine Breillat's remake of May el-Toukhy's 2019 drama Queen of Hearts is one of the most fascinating remakes I've seen in quite a while. While nearly a scene-for-scene replica of the provocative Danish original in terms of structure and dialogue, this distinctly French take on the material is radically different in its tone and themes. I don't even think the films are of the same genre. Queen of Hearts is a tragedy in the classical sense of that term, where as I'm not exactly sure how to characterize Last Summer. Dark comedy is at least as accurate as erotic drama, which is the category most will put it in. And rightly so. Last Summer is nothing if not erotic, which Queen of Hearts isn't really. The original film, co-written by el-Toukhy and Maren Louise Käehne, is far more sexually explicit and graphically photographed than Last Summer, yet Breillat's film is far far sexier. There's a close-up of two characters kissing in this film, which is the most erotic thing I've seen in a movie in more than twenty-five years! The arousing and charged way the film's subject matter is presented and many other small but significant choices make Breillat's film far more disturbing and challenging than its Danish predecessor and easily lands it as one of the year's best pictures.

Léa Drucker (The Blue Room, Custody, Close) plays Anna, a victim's advocacy lawyer who works with vulnerable populations. She's in a comfortable marriage to an older businessman, Pierre. Both are well-contented with their upscale home, devoted to their work, and dote on their young adopted Asian daughters. But soon, Pierre's estranged teenage son from a previous marriage, Theo, enters their lives. Played by newcomer Samuel Kircher, Theo is a sullen, troubled kid who has been kicked out of his boarding school and his mother's home. Once unhappily re-ensconced in his father's life, Theo acts out in typically teenage ways. Anna assumes these are attempts to get the attention of his distant father, and she takes on the role of Theo's confidant. Their relationship quickly escalates into something far more intimate and forbidden, which soon threatens the stability of Anna's well-ordered world.

Drucker's performance is nothing short of a revelation. In the Danish original, we don't feel much empathy towards the protagonist even though she's portrayed by the great Trine Dyrholm, giving one of her typically riveting and nuanced performances. Denholm and el-Toukhy make their Anna fascinating to observe—she's cool and calculated even though her actions often seem out of control—but I don't believe we're meant to identify with her. Queen of Hearts, while never feeling the least bit preachy, is a morality play. It's a melodrama that aspires to the level of classic tragedy. In Late Summer, we're encouraged to relate to Anne and understand how she could allow herself to make the choices she makes. The film, and Drucker's performance specifically, embodies the sentiment and emotions expressed in the famous Nicole Kidman monologue near the beginning of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. But whereas I never fully bought that monologue as the deep insight into the female psyche that I think it's meant to be, that tangible discernment is exactly what I think gets conveyed through this picture. Watching it opens the door to palpable comprehension of the illicit, destructive impulses and passions that probably lurk within all human beings.

It's all the more surprising that I'd be pointing to a film by Breillat as being able to reach me on a visceral level in comparison to the cerebral Kubrick because, prior to this movie, I assumed she was far more cold and intellectual than even the notoriously aloof, chilly, and cerebral Stanley. Granted, I need to see more of Breillat's pictures! The 75-year-old French director, novelist, and provocateur has been making challenging films since 1975, but I’ve only seen two of them—1999's Romance and 2013's Abuse of Weakness (her last film before this one). I can't say I thought much of either of those previous pictures, which felt less like cinematic narratives and more like direct challenges to the audience from a self-identified auteur, which is not a style of cinema I usually resonate with. But Last Summer does what I believe only great cinema can do: engage us cerebrally about lofty notions, ideas, and intellectual concepts by drawing us in emotionally with a relatable narrative and characters in which we can see ourselves, at least a little.

The little changes Breillat makes to the details of the original film are deviously clever and sharp. Drucker and Dyrholm are exactly the same age, which makes Dyrholm younger when she played Anna four years earlier, but Drucker's Anna is played to be younger; I don't think she's given too much thought about having entered mid-life. Part of why she seems so young is because the actor playing Anna's husband (Olivier Rabourdin) is presented as significantly older than Magnus Krepper, who played the husband in Queen of Hearts. Breillat adds a brief dialogue exchange in a sex scene between Anna and Pierre, which efficiently establishes this age gap and a few other key points. Similarly, Kircher's Théo seems much younger and far more emotionally unstable than Gustav Lindh does in the Danish version. It seems all the more reckless for this Anna to enter into any kind of relationship with this kid, yet these actors and this director make it seem inevitable. The way Last Summer's Anna is depicted concerning her job features tiny differences from the Queen of Hearts Anne that cause us to perceive her in significantly different ways. Even the fact that Drucker's Anna has twin girls adopted from Asia rather than little blonde kids she gave birth to herself plays into our perception of her in subtle but unmistakable ways.

Ultimately, Last Summer is a movie about power dynamics and the various ways people wield dominance over each other and themselves. Breillat makes the most significant alterations to the source material in her film's last act. These scenes take the movie in intriguing directions both narrativly and thematically. Unfortunately, at the very end, the film breaks the credibility it so richly established and suddenly shifts out of the visceral and, for the first time, into the intellectual. If this had to happen, the final scenes are a good place to do it, but I wish Breillat had been able to convey her final summations without breaking the spell she wove so perfectly throughout the rest of her film. The ending almost caused me to rate this picture a notch lower than four stars, but of all the films I've seen this year, this is the one that has stayed with me the longest, and I'm still pondering the meaning of its last line and final image a full month later. Last Summer may conclude with a thesis statement I don't necessarily agree with, but it's one I can't dismiss and, therefore, must reckon with. And I can't even remember the last time a film had that effect on me!