Anne (Lea Drucker), the heroine of Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer, which opens around Israel on August 1, is asked about her greatest fear, and she replies, “For everything to disappear, or worse, for me to do all I can to make everything disappear. It’s my vertigo theory. Vertigo isn’t the fear of falling; it’s the fear of the irrepressible temptation to fall.
It’s so awful that it’s better to jump to stop the fear.” Anne seems to have everything. She lives with her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), an executive, in a gorgeous home in the suburbs of Paris, where she is raising their adopted Asian daughters.
She is also a brilliant legal advocate for at-risk minors. Everyone and everything in her life is beautiful, especially her lovely wardrobe, and she has a pair of pumps to match each dress. Even their coffee maker is tasteful-looking.
But then her 17-year-old stepson, Theo (Samuel Kircher), comes to live with them, and her worst fears are soon realized; she starts putting everything good in her life at risk. He is an aimless kid, full of resentment at his father for leaving his mother and destined to fail his matriculation exams if he ever takes them. But he’s also handsome and sexy, and she falls into a passionate sexual affair with him.
The movie is the story of their illicit and immoral relationship, the kind that once upon a time was winked at when the younger person was a male teenager but is now viewed as a serious criminal offense. One of the .