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.
βMen want to repudiate their wives of a certain age by saying they couldnβt be loved by anyone anymore,β Breillat said in a recent video interview via an interpreter. βBut for me thatβs not true. I want to tell other women thereβs no cause for despair.β In βLast Summer,β 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 βLast Summer,β that dynamic is inverted: A middled-aged lawyer, Anne (LΓ©a Drucker), risks her career and marriage by having a clandestine affair with her 17-year-old stepson, ThΓ©o (Samuel Kircher).
The film, Breillatβs 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 βThe Idea of Youβ and Todd Haynesβs divisive βMay December.β (Haynesβs 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. βItβs the truth,β she said: βYoung people are attracted to older women.β
While βMay Decemberβ positions the young man as a victim grappling with conflicted feelings, Breillat instead made the teen in her movie βnot only the object of desire, but the subject of desire,β she said, and the one who βpresses for this affair to take place.β Breillat refuses to pass judgment on either of her characters, and instead chronicles how the illicit desire consumes them both.
βI find such a portrait far more interesting than the moralizing society loves to engage in,β she said.
Part of Breillatβs motivation in making βLast Summerβ β which is a reimagining of another film, the 2019 Danish drama βQueen of Heartsβ β was to interrogate the idea of the βcougarβ (a term she hates) and the social norms that suggest βif itβs a woman who is seen with a younger man, you assume he is only with her for financial reasons,β she said.
In her nearly five-decade career, which includes acting in the scandalous Bernardo Bertolucci film βLast Tango in Paris,β female sexuality has been the primary concern of Breillatβs work.
βFew 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,β wrote Manohla Dargis in her Times review of βLast Summer.β
Breillatβs fearless exploration of desire onscreen, however, has sometimes elicited pushback in France, where she has rarely been recognized. If it werenβt for the positive reception to her work in English-speaking countries, Breillat said she believes her career in her home country would be nonexistent.
When she released the 1988 feature β36 Fillette,β in which a playboy in his 40s manipulates a 14-year-old girl into a sexual relationship, French critics, Breillat recalled, claimed it was βthe worst French film ever made.β
βI was criticized for having a male protagonist who was a βcaricature,ββ she said. βAnd of course, the #MeToo movement has shown that I never invent anything in my cinema, that what I portray is a reality.β
Although she is known for the sometimes-explicit moments of intimacy in her work, Breillat said she didnβt think of βLast Summerβ as a story in which carnal pleasure was the focal point. βThis film is about the dark side of desire,β she said.
Still, βLast Summerβ features three sex scenes between Anne and ThΓ©o, each one at a distinct point in their doomed liaison. Their nakedness, however, remains deliberately offscreen. βYou donβt have to shoot their bodies,β Breillat said. βThe transcendent emotions they are undergoing are only visible on their faces.β
In focusing on their agitated visages, Breillat said she was interested in wondering what the characters were thinking while engaging in the sexual act. What are they imagining?
βLove is about telling yourself stories; itβs about projecting yourself onto a relationship,β she said. βTherefore, itβs a fiction. Itβs about thought. Itβs about ideas.β
Breillat said she is vehemently against employing intimacy coordinators, whose job, she said, was more about βputting blinders on the eyes of the viewers,β than ensuring the actorsβ emotional safety. In her view, thatβs what the director is there for. βIf a director isnβt capable of staging such a scene, then they simply shouldnβt do them,β she said.
Thereβs always fear involved in filming sex scenes, Breillat said, because they require utter vulnerability. For the French provocatrice, thatβs how it should be.
βWhatβs the point of making films if youβre not going to be afraid, if the stakes arenβt so crucial that theyβre about whatβs at the heart of our existence?β she said.