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.