Playing at Cannes to nice notices and perhaps little else––no awards, alas!––Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer nevertheless yields interest above much competition brethren. Her first feature since 2013’s Abuse of Weakness (which I just found myself pulverized by courtesy Criterion) remakes 2019’s Queen of Hearts with what has been described as Breillat-like zeal: sex in all its passions and taboos.
Ahead of TIFF and NYFF showings that’ll lead to a Janus-Sideshow release, we have a first English-subtitled trailer playing brief and in broad strokes. It nicely rhymes with Savina Petkova’s review out of Cannes, where she said, “Unlike the underlying cynicism of Brief Crossing––a film with a similar age gap and dynamic––Last Summer finds Breillat more open to the tenderness of love’s initial stages: Drucker lights up, she orgasms, she laughs, and even her lexicon changes. There are three sex scenes in the film, and all of them are magnificent: the camera keeps to one face at a time for a long––delightful––amount of time as features become distorted by the seismic force of orgasm. Certainly a departure from Sex is Comedy‘s brilliantly funny meta-exposé of erotic scenes, Breillat’s latest gives love a chance.”
Find the teaser (including a quote from “Film Stage”) below:
Anne, a brilliant lawyer, lives in perfect harmony with her husband Pierre and their six and eight‑year-old daughters, in a house on the heights of Paris. One day, Theo, 17, Pierre’s son from a previous marriage, moves in with them. Anne is troubled by Theo and gradually engages in a passionate relationship with him, putting her career and family life in danger.
