Filmmaker Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl) has long made sex and female desire her central subjects, variously examining sexual awakening, sexual taboos, and transgressive habits in her work. Breillat’s latest, Last Summer, concerns all three: Centered on a middle-aged lawyer, Anne (Léa Drucker), and her tempestuous love affair with her 17-year-old stepson, Theo (Samuel Kircher), the film explores the limits of desire, testing its viewers’ boundaries at the same time.
After a decade-long absence from filmmaking—it’s become increasingly difficult to secure funding due to what’s seen as the disturbing nature of her films, according to the director—Breillat has returned to the screen with renewed vigor. “I couldn’t live without cinema—in fact, I wasn’t alive,” she reflects of that fallow period. It was Saïd Ben Saïd, a producer of Ira Sachs’s Passages (2023) and much of Paul Verhoeven’s work, “who brought me back to life, resuscitated me,” by suggesting Breillat adapt the 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts as her next project.
That film and Breillat’s follow the same straightforward plotline: The illicit couple is discovered, and Anne goes to great lengths to preserve her marriage. Yet where the original hinged on overt moral judgments, Breillat’s version strips much of that away, allowing the story to unfold in a more ambiguous—and distinctly unsettling—manner.
“When you adapt a film, you are making it your own,” Breillat asserts. One way that she’s done this is by shifting the dynamic of Anne and Theo’s relationship toward mutual temptation, rather than pure predation. Take the scene where Theo threatens to reveal the affair to his father. In the Danish version, this reads as an act of blackmail. “But in my film, with the same dialogue, what Theo is actually doing is declaring his love for his stepmother, trying to obtain her affection,” Breillat says. Filtered through her lens, the same script yields a vastly different outcome, shaping the ultimate meaning of the story. “A comparison of the two films could be used as a lesson in screenwriting,” Breillat notes, “showing that the true author isn’t the writer but the director.”
Breillat also places greater emphasis on Anne’s profession—she is, rather ironically, a criminal lawyer who advocates for victims of abuse—by opening the film on a young girl who has been raped, another small adjustment that speaks volumes. “It means that this woman is conscious of the boundaries and knows the limits,” says Léa Drucker. “Yet the strength of her desire is something that she’s unable to refuse or avoid.” That framing serves to complicate the audience’s perception of Anne—which is torqued once again when she tells Theo, with plaintive reluctance, of a past sexual trauma, suggesting a more fragile psyche beneath the surface. “This woman has a very bad start in her romantic life,” explains Drucker. “We can imagine how awful it was, even if it’s subtle in the movie. I think she wants to relive it again, in a nice way, and so she thinks she’s 15 years old again.”
Drucker was not Breillat’s initial choice for Anne. “When I’d thought of her before, I’d seen her as someone else’s actor,” the director admits. Drucker is famous for her performances on stage—she’s been nominated for the Molière Award, the French equivalent of the Tony, twice—and for her lead role in the British-French TV series The War of the World alongside Gabriel Bryne. “But when she came to my house to talk with me about the role,“ Breillat continues, “I saw her in the flesh and realized that this was the body that I would be able to work with. She would become my creation.” Breillat refers to the casting process as one of “incarnation,” calling for the actors to become one with the film and abandon themselves to it. “They invest themselves into their characters, and that’s what is transmitted to the audience.”
While Breillat grants her actors latitude to develop the internal workings and psychologies of their characters, she is highly particular about the details ultimately communicated through her direction. “She would yell at me if I turned and appeared in profile when I was in scenes with Olivier [Rabourdin], who played my husband,” Drucker says. “In France we’ve been learning and experimenting with the Meisner technique, the Method, and you can use these with Catherine, but just know you’re always acting in her frame. It’s restricting, but at the same time, it can be freeing within those confines because she’s very precise.”
Breillat applies the same specificity to costumes. Anne’s wardrobe draws from the subtle glamour of the 1950s (“Back when women had breasts and hips,” the director says), and Drucker recalls a lengthy fitting process akin to working on a period drama. “I remember initially thinking, I’m not going to be very comfortable in these,” she says of the formfitting sheath dresses that Breillat has favored for decades. “But I immediately understood that if I wanted to do [justice to] this character and be free with my own body, I had to work in this costume. It was almost like a form of rehearsal.”
As in Breillat’s previous films, however, a sense of timelessness pervades the aesthetic; the exact year and place are left intentionally unclear. “I don’t want my films to ever be dated,” the director explains. “I choose costumes and haircuts for the actors that don’t go out of style because the emotions they’re expressing don’t go out of date.” She takes a similar approach to sound: For Last Summer, she had the ineffable Kim Gordon, a founding member of Sonic Youth, contribute an original bass-heavy track that plays over the end credits. (Gordon, for her part, was a fan: The name of her current group, Body/Head, is a nod to a line from Breillat’s 1988 film 36 Fillette.)
Throughout her body of work, Breillat has sought to undo the eroticism of the male gaze. In Last Summer’s first sex scene, the focus is trained squarely on the young man’s face, and—bucking convention—Anne’s body is never shown onscreen during the sequence. “The end result is something uncannily intimate, even more so than bodies,” Breillat says. The approach was conceived the night before filming, as Breillat lay in Theo’s cramped room on the set, where the confines of the space restricted where and how she could place a camera. (Ultimately, she would raise the bed to create a low angle.) “She’s like a painter,” says Drucker of the filmmaker’s meticulous framing methods. “She is one of the best cinematographers I know, with this language of cinema that is very rich, very powerful.”
Like many other French directors, Breillat has voiced skepticism about the value of intimacy coordinators on set, underscoring her belief in the director’s vision and the deep trust that can—and should—be fostered between actor and filmmaker. “Cinema is about the point of view of the artist, not some stranger,” Breillat says. “Once the actors entrust themselves to you, they allow you to work with them as you want. There’s symbiosis between the actor and the director. I devour the actors with my eyes. When the actors abandon themselves to the film, to their roles, that’s what gives the film transcendence and beauty. When I ask an actor to express ecstasy or enjoyment, I am asking for the most intimate thing possible, the thing that will make the viewer mute. That intimacy is on their faces.”
She didn’t rehearse much with Kircher, who was a minor at the time of filming (“He’d be in the middle of exams in the morning and then shooting love scenes in the afternoon,” Breillat says), instead working directly with Drucker, who had never filmed a sex scene before. “She would say things like, ‘Turn your face this way, think [as if] you’re dying,’” Drucker recalls. (Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy was one point of reference.) “I tried not to overthink it and just receive Catherine’s visions.”
Breillat has often sparked controversy due to her unapologetically explicit (and, sometimes, allegedly unsimulated) depictions of sex, as well as her remarks on the #MeToo movement and figures like Harvey Weinstein. “I’m very much a supporter of the #MeToo movement,” she clarifies. “When such movements become doctrinaire and dogmatic, that’s the problem. I see elements or exaggerations of the movement as puritanical, and that’s what I’m avoiding.” Frequently in her interviews, Breillat has invoked a seminal speech about the role of women and the female body in cinema that she delivered on Iranian television before the Revolutionary Guard. “A speech like that, calling for the women’s vision of filmmaking and the female gaze, it seems contradictory that it should be given in Iran, and yet it would have been equally radical to make in the US,” Breillat argues.
Her feminism is about nuance and depth, rejecting simplistic moral judgments in favor of a richer exploration of the human experience. “It’s especially important for a director in today’s world to make explicit that cinema is fiction and that it’s not the job of a filmmaker to moralize,” she says. In the final scene of Last Summer, Theo arrives at Anne’s doorstep in the dark of the night with a last plea.
Breillat was deliberate about leaving things open to interpretation, she says. “Because when you do so, when the spectator fills in those blanks, what she or he is actually doing is creating a portrait of themselves.”
Last Summer is in theaters now.