L’été dernier
Catherine Breillat, France, Norway, 2023o
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.
It's been ten years since Catherine Breillat last released a feature-length film, and now she's back in the spotlight - and with good reason: the director has earned a reputation for being no-nonsense when it comes to filming desire. Her latest opus, about the troubled love affairs of a middle-aged lawyer and her under-age stepson, amply confirms this. Breillat's return to the big time, even if it's through a small form (bourgeois melodrama), is moving in its direct, uncluttered way of capturing desire in its most irrepressible manifestations (skin brushing against skin, bodies seeking and finding each other), beyond taboos. And reveals that what drives his cinema, perhaps more than a taste for transgression, is the quest for emotion, captured here in frontal close-ups to which Léa Drucker offers her face. In a word, it's wonderful.
Emilien Gür