Last Summer (Movie)

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    A Woman Sleeping With Her Stepson? This Director Knows It May Shock.

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    The French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has been exploring relationships between girls and older men since the 1970s. Her latest, “Last Summer,” flips the script.When the French director Catherine Breillat was 40, her then-husband and the father of her first child ended their relationship to be with a much younger woman. Soon after, Breillat started dating a man 12 years her junior.“Men want to repudiate their wives of a certain age by saying they couldn’t be loved by anyone anymore,” Breillat said in a recent video interview via an interpreter. “But for me that’s not true. I want to tell other women there’s no cause for despair.” In “Last Summer,” which comes to theaters Friday, she probes at this realization through an incendiary premise.Since the 1970s, the lauded director, now 75, has repeatedly focused her unflinching gaze on the troubled sexual awakenings of girls, often in the uncaring hands of older men, but in “Last Summer,” that dynamic is inverted: A middled-aged lawyer, Anne (Léa Drucker), risks her career and marriage by having a clandestine affair with her 17-year-old stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher).In “Last Summer,” Anne, played by Léa Drucker, risks her career, and her marriage to Pierre, played by Olivier Rabourdin, by having an affair with her stepson Théo.via Sideshow and Janus FilmsThe film, Breillat’s first in a decade, joins several recent movies concerned with the power dynamics of heterosexual couples in which the woman is older, including the lighter Anne Hathaway-vehicle “The Idea of You” and Todd Haynes’s divisive “May December.” (Haynes’s movie was inspired by the true story of a teacher who started a relationship with one of her students.)According to Breillat, this wave of films reflects a simple reality. “It’s the truth,” she said: “Young people are attracted to older women.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Last Summer’ Review: A Shocking Affair to Remember

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      Few directors get as deeply under the skin as Catherine Breillat, a longtime provocateur who tests the limits of what the world thinks women should do and say and be.When Anne, the elegant, enigmatic protagonist in Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer,” walks in a room, she holds your gaze as formidably as she holds those of everyone in this startling, perverse French movie. A lawyer, wife, mother and sister, Anne likes sheath dresses and high heels, tasteful antiques and a sense of order. She’s serenely self-possessed, and everything in her life is just so, which suggests that she’s either invincible or waiting to break. Both are in play when she abandons herself in a shocking, recklessly consuming affair.Few directors get as deeply under the skin as Breillat, a longtime, reliably interesting provocateur who tests the limits of what the world thinks women should do and say and be. Breillat is interested in complexity, not orthodoxy (feminist or otherwise), in autonomy and subjugation, and in all the ways that pleasure and desire can take violent hold of minds and bodies. She was in her 20s when she directed her first feature, “A Real Young Girl” (1976), about a teenager’s sexual coming-of-age. It’s a messy, jolting movie; there aren’t many filmmakers who shock you like Breillat does and with such supremely natural ease.Anne, played by a superb Léa Drucker, seems wholly satisfied in her world. She and her loving, attentive husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), have two sweet girls, and live in a large, handsome suburban home. She’s close to her sister, Mina (Clotilde Courau), and Anne’s work seems satisfying and perhaps even important: She advocates for victims of sexual abuse and in cases involving parental custodianship. Outwardly, her life looks ideal, if maybe overly comfortable, and its frictionless surfaces — especially in a French movie about upper-class people — seem primed for disruption. Even so, nothing about her suggests that she will soon lose herself in an affair with her 17-year-old stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher).When “Last Summer” opens, Théo is living with his mother and has just been arrested. Pierre has decided to bring his son back home with him, a decision he explains to Anne while the couple are in their bedroom, an intimate setting that is as meaningful as it is banal. As Pierre hurriedly packs his bag, Breillat discreetly pushes the camera closer to him as he and an offscreen Anne talk. The scene is brief, and seemingly purely informational. Yet right after Pierre says that Théo punched a teacher, Breillat cuts to Anne who’s busily changing her clothes. Her dress is hiked over her face, exposing her trim body and pretty bra.Within minutes, Breillat has introduced both her characters and their world with brisk narrative economy and a sly, telegraphing conflation of sex and violence: the bedroom, the couple, the son, the punch, the lingerie. The movie has scarcely begun yet everything, including the complacency and first stirrings of trouble, is in place. These stirrings abruptly turn into klaxons when Théo arrives shortly thereafter, and Anne goes to speak to him. The moment that he appears onscreen — he’s on the bed in his room, his messy dark curls cascading over his face — it’s clear that he is this movie’s version of Chekhov’s gun.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Last Summer’ Review: Growing Pains

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      Sunny days turn to sweaty nights on the Mediterranean coast in this Turkish coming-of-age film that follows a teenage boy who pines for his older sister’s best friend.The film “Last Summer” plays like an extended montage advertising the arresting views and clear Mediterranean waters of southern Turkey. Like a migratory fish, the teenage Deniz (Fatih Sahin) is lucky to spend summers on this divine coastline beaching, discoing and bronzing in the seaside town where his family has a cottage. This gauzy coming-of-age movie (on Netflix) is set during the summer of 1997, as Deniz tags along with his cool older sister, Ebru (Aslihan Malbora), while nursing puppy love for her teasing bestie, Asli (Ece Cesmioglu).The director Ozan Aciktan is interested in exploring how Deniz’s crush on Asli, a flirtatious young woman, reflects his yearning for what he sees as the confidence and thrills of adulthood. When he accompanies Asli and her friends to a high cliff, Deniz shows off by jumping off into the sea. Although he survives the plunge, the gash he gets on his foot is a sign that while growing up is exhilarating, it is not without pain.The film’s attention to Deniz’s growing pains is useful as Asli, a lovely but hazy character, meets a charming older man, and Deniz’s shy longing takes a jealous turn. Tension builds over sunny days and sweaty nights. But upon reaching its climax, the movie fails to fulfill. Asli’s feelings seem to change on a whim, and Deniz suffers no consequences for his mistakes. For all the beauty of its dazzling vacation setting, “Last Summer” coasts, but not toward any satisfying destination.Last SummerNot rated. In Turkish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More