Female Film Critics 24/375
Last Summer dramatizes a steamy mother and stepson affair. French writer/director Catherine Breillat creates films that unsettle viewers in ways few other directors dare. In Last Summer, her first feature in ten years, she is again true to form. Centered around middle-aged lawyer Anne’s sexual life, a shocking, unexpected transgression dominates the story.
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Rife with tension, ambiguous morals and sexual taboos, Catherine Breillat is back with her first film in a decade, the unexpectedly thrilling Last Summer. The film occupies familiar territory for Breillat–that of doomed relationships–with a focus on Anne, a successful lawyer in her early fifties who engages in a torrid affair with her 17-year-old stepson Théo. And while culturally, things are indeed “different in France,” (Théo drinks alcohol legally and has been smoking with his parents since the age of 12, for example), Breillat treats their relationship as something far more damaging than a mere sexual indiscretion.
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