Last Summer
Directed by Catherine Breillat
Running time: 1hr44 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Samuel Kircher and Lea Drucker in Last Summer
The word “remake” tends to get many cinephiles in an almost reflexive mode of attack (or defence, regarding the sacred cows being milked once more), and often reasonably so: surely nobody’s heart leapt at last month’s news that a Robert Downey Jr. update of Vertigo is in the works at Paramount. The truth, however, is that many of us treasure certain remakes (my favourites run from George Cukor’s Holiday to John Carpenter’s The Thing) to the point where we forget they’re not the originals — and the secret, too rarely heeded by Hollywood, is not to do over classics, but films with ample room for improvement in the first place. Catherine Breillat, onetime shock queen of the French arthouse, knows the score.
Danish filmmaker May el-Toukhy’s Queen of Hearts premiered at Sundance four years ago to mostly appreciative reviews, thanks largely to a terrific performance by Trine Dyrholm that dignified a somewhat ludicrous melodramatic premise: wealthy, happily married career woman risks throwing it all away for a torrid affair with [needle scratch] her teenage stepson. Yet the film, glossy and gripping in a high-class sort of way — an Aēsop-opera, if you will — never entirely made us believe it: the script skipped over certain nuances and character details begging to be filled in by another writer. In my Variety review at the time, I quipped that we could expect a Robin Wright-starring US remake at any moment. I was half-right, and also very wrong.
At first it seems surprising that Breillat would choose this second-hand material for her first film in ten years. But only a few minutes into Last Summer, her smart, sun-bleached yet consistently chilly tightening of el-Toukhy’s film, it feels right: now in her seventies, the Frenchwoman has made a career of probing the thornier, more perverse crevices of female sexuality, the desires and impulses that the cinematic patriarchy would rather not see on screen. So she brings a certain matter-of-fact credibility, as well as a streak of still-subversive erotic zeal, to this portrait of Anne (Lea Drucker), a coolly competent lawyer who specialises in (irony alert!) family crises, and who brings similarly assured efficiency to her household, which she shares with bearish, overworked husband Pierre (an excellent Olivier Rabourdin) and their two adorable adopted daughters.
This neat domestic unit is disrupted when Theo (Samuel Kircher, heavy-lidded and intriguingly hard to read), Pierre’s estranged 17-year-old son from a previous marriage, moves in, having been kicked out of his mother’s house due to his behavioural issues. Anne, always as crisp and carefully composed as her chicly minimalist wardrobe, isn’t fazed by his sullen, tacitly hostile presence, and attempts to insert herself between father and son as a kind of cool-stepmom intermediary. When she consents to let him give her a stick-and-poke tattoo, she’s arguably out of her depth; when she tumbles into bed with him, she’s definitely over the line. Aware of her mistake, yet still bristling with renewed carnal excitement, she addresses the situation as a canny lawyer well might: avowed denial.
Who would do such a thing, we think, and why? And yet, via Breillat’s muted yet sensually heightened direction, and Drucker’s immaculately controlled yet internally free-falling performance, we buy it. Last Summer doesn’t make its characters explain themselves, or insert reams of psychological backstory, though its few cues and clues make fraught and fragile what could have seemed merely contrived. It doesn’t even radically reconfigure Queen of Hearts, at least until a wholly divergent and much improved ending that resists melodramatic tidiness, leaving key tensions crackling and Breillat’s penchant for untoward impulses still very much in play.
Sometimes what separates proficient and superior takes on the same material are intangible elements: the particular temperature of chemistry between Kircher and Drucker, the hard, light-sliced mise-en-scène led by cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie, the dialogue the film joins with its director’s previous films. By Breillat’s standards, this is an unprecedentedly sleek commercial play, alluring and grabby — yet with an innate, considered nastiness, an unspoken intellectualisation of our least explicable instincts, that never feels compromised. If she remade Fifty Shades of Grey next, I wouldn’t doubt her.
LAST SUMMER (2023) Written by Catherine Breillat | Shot by Jeanne Lapoirie | Edited by François Quiqueré
Playing at the 76th Cannes Film festival as part of the Competition strand