The Awful Ferocity of Midlife Desire
The protagonist of Last Summer, a lawyer named Anne (played by Léa Drucker), lives in the Gallic version of a Nancy Meyers utopia: a resplendent French country home with parquet floors, velvet throw pillows, and the faintest hum of ennui. Anne dresses in shades of cream—she’s a woman who never spills so much as a drop. She drives a vintage Mercedes convertible. She represents girls who are being or have been abused, with alternating ferocity and tenderness. Early in the movie, Anne’s 17-year-old stepson moves into her home, and his surly, careless presence instantly disrupts her controlled environment. Théo (Samuel Kircher) leaves behind overflowing ashtrays and dirty socks; he steals from her purse and walks around half-naked, like a rangy, disaffected teen idol. But where the standard Meyers heroine would fuss herself into a fugue state of approbation, Anne remains oddly unruffled. Does she … like Théo? Is she secretly enjoying watching her perfect home get all scuffed up and sullied?
Anne is inscrutable, as the director Catherine Breillat’s heroines usually are, but there are clues dropped like pearls throughout the, a remake of a Danish film, is the 75-year-old auteur’s first project in a decade. Starting in the 1960s, when she released a novel so explicit at the age of 17 that she was technically too young to buy it, Breillat’s mission has been, as the writer Chris Kraus once observed, to “exhume the unspeakable ‘horror’ of hetero-female identity and look at it, coolly.” She digs into the matter of female sexuality with the detached commitment of your average ob-gyn. In 1999’s , a young teacher whose boyfriend refuses to sleep with her goes on an epic, self-hating quest of sexual exploration and degradation. , from 2021, is about a homely 12-year-old whose own nascent sexuality is formed as she watches her sister be coerced into losing her virginity to a law student. Breillat is the opposite of sentimental. “I’m a feminist,” she has said, “but not in my films.” She crosses all and any lines— famously featured what was supposedly an unsimulated sex scene between the lead actress and the porn star Rocco Siffredi—in service of considering what women being so consistently hated and feared as sexual objects does to their own desire.
