Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer is a remake of a 2019 Danish film called Queen of Hearts, May el-Toukhy’s feature about a woman who embarks on a sexual relationship with her teenage stepson. This adaptation follows the original closely, down to specific scenes and lines of dialogue. Yet it is a Breillat work in every conceivable way, a challenging, sometimes ecstatic engagement with desire, sex, shame, and power that manages to be strikingly different in tone, emphasis, and conclusion from its source.

Last Summer begins with a woman questioning a trembling teenage girl about past events and sexual partners. At first, it looks as if this is an interrogation: it soon becomes apparent that the woman is preparing the teenager, in a brisk, matter-of-fact fashion, to face court in a case in which the teenager is a victim but which the defence will try to turn her into the accused.

It is a strong, distressing opening that, in the briefest of ways, accomplishes several things. It introduces the figure of Anne, a lawyer specialising in advocacy for young people. It is an image of youth and vulnerability in the face of institutional power. It provides the first example of acts of questioning and recollecting that will play a significant role in the film. And it establishes Breillat’s recurring embrace of the sustained close-up as an intense, evocative device.

Anne is played by Léa Drucker with a mixture of command and ease that only gradually begins to unravel. We first see her as an efficient, elegant figure whose style is expressed through variations on a uniform: pale sheath dress with matching high heels (often accessorised at home with a glass of white wine). She lives with her husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), and their young adopted daughters, Serena and Angela (Serena Hu and Angela Chen), in a comfortable house on the outskirts of Paris. This summer, there is an addition to the household: Théo (Samuel Kircher), Pierre’s seventeen-year-old son from his first marriage. He has been expelled from his school after a physical altercation with a teacher. In desperation, his mother dispatches him to stay with his father.

Pierre and Anne seem at first glance to be the model of a well-regulated bourgeois family with all the right accoutrements, rituals, and expectations. At first, Théo resists them. He is surly and uncooperative with both adults, although from the outset he is good-natured and playful with his little sisters. Kircher is an effortless presence as Théo, loose-limbed and graceful, with something of the unsettling angelic look of Björn Andrésen in Death in Venice (1971). This is Kircher’s first feature, but he comes from an acting family: his brother is Paul Kircher (The Animal Kingdom), his mother is Irène Jacob (The Double Life of Véronique, Three Colours: Red).

Björn Andrésen as Théo and Léa Drucker as Anne (courtesy of Potential Films)

Things change between Anne and Théo when she discovers something highly dubious that he has done and decides to keep quiet about it. She tells him that she knows, but says it will be their secret. From this point, there is an air of complicity between them; she enters into it with increasingly giddy delight. Their intimacy rapidly escalates; their first sexual encounter, which takes place while Pierre is away at a conference, happens with a kind of inevitability.

Breillat is known for unflinching, sometimes explicit depictions of sex. But here her focus is on the faces of her characters – prolonged close-ups of rapturous, transported expressions, of almost romanticised pleasure. Afterwards, Anne insists that what took place must be another secret, never to be spoken of again, that this is the last time. It is, of course, nothing of the sort.

From her first film, A Real Young Girl (1976), Breillat has tackled taboo in her own idiosyncratically rigorous fashion. She is fascinated by the insistent demands of desire and the lure of recklessness, but she is also fiercely critical of the judgements passed on girls and women who do not conform to prevailing morality.

There are various stories of female vulnerability embedded in Last Summer. There is Anne’s client from the opening scene, as well as another young woman she is working with, who is newly reunited with her father by court order. Even a brief scene in which Anne reads a bedtime story to her girls – from Hans Christian’s Andersen’s The Little Mermaid – registers as a tale of female longing linked to pain. And there is an undercurrent running through the film that concerns her own memories of youth, sex, and desire. It starts early on, with a scene in which Anne, in bed with her husband, says in a dreamy way, ‘When I was fourteen, I was secretly in love with a friend of my mother.’ Anne starts to recall the mixture of fascination and disgust she felt for the body of a man who, she says, was all of thirty-three at the time.

This recollection appears to be connected to later, troubled memories that she refers to or deflects from in a game of question-and-answer that Théo initiates. ‘Will you tell the whole truth?’ he asks her during this scene. ‘The truths,’ she replies. Among the things she reveals is a behavioural theory that should have given Théo pause. There is something irresistible about Anne, who, at times, has the froideur of a classic Hitchcock blonde, talking about her ‘vertigo theory’. She tells Théo that she believes that vertigo isn’t the fear of falling, ‘but fear of the irresistible temptation to fall. It’s so awful that it’s better to jump to stop the fear.’ It is an indication of how she understands choice and consequence.

In some ways, Anne is still the fourteen-year-old with fantasies that combine desire and disgust and the young woman suppressing memories she cannot speak of. She also has access to certain types of power, and in a startling scene that turns the film upside down, this becomes suddenly, shockingly clear. It is a shift that redefines the film and everything that happens subsequently. Anne, whose susceptibilities and frailties Breillat understands and sympathises with, is also a formidable strategist who understands the rules of the game in a way that Théo does not. His vulnerability – something Breillat registers in varying ways – is much in evidence in the second part of Last Summer. Even then, Breillat, ever disconcerting, chooses not to give us a conclusion; what we are left with is a mixture of certainty and uncertainty, an acknowledgment of the ways in which chaos and order can coexist.

Last Summer (Potential Films) is released nationally on 5 September 2024.