Last Summer (2023) – AKA L’Été Dernier

possesses the age, authority and experience, yet she behaves as if desire has temporarily freed her from responsibility. Théo, meanwhile, swings between cocky seducer, needy child and wounded outsider. Their affair briefly creates a private bubble of glances, kisses, whispered promises and hurried sex, but the difference between what each believes it means soon tears through it. Anne wants the thrill without surrendering her marriage, children, home or public reputation; Théo becomes increasingly attached, jealous and volatile when she attempts to return him to his proper place in the family. What begins as mutual recklessness develops into an emotional struggle over possession, truth and credibility. Once Théo can no longer tolerate Anne’s retreat, the secret moves dangerously close to Pierre, and Anne’s professional talent for controlling a story becomes far more chilling than any bedroom scene. Breillat films all this with unnerving patience, lingering on faces until affection, fear and calculation seem to occupy the same expression. The central irony is brutal: a woman celebrated for protecting vulnerable youngsters cannot admit that she has exploited one inside her own home. Yet the film never becomes a sermon. It is about desire curdling into self-preservation, and about how quickly love, or something mistaken for love, can become a weapon when one person has everything to lose and the other feels he has nothing.

This is contemporary affluent France: convertibles, summer dresses, garden lunches, cigarettes, wine glasses and a handsome house large enough for everyone to hide from everyone else. Shot in the Yvelines area, its leafy domestic setting looks warm and inviting, while the clear, low-contrast photography keeps the emotional temperature strangely cold. The vibe is intimate, privileged and faintly poisonous—a lazy French summer with a live grenade under the picnic table.

Léa Drucker is the whole dangerous package here: elegant, intelligent, beautifully groomed and armed with glacial blue eyes that can switch from maternal warmth to naked hunger and then to lawyerly steel. She gives Anne a mature, distinctly feminine allure without softening her selfishness, and her willingness to appear needy, aroused and morally cornered makes the performance sting. The film is sexually frank rather than pornographic, with prolonged kissing, bed scenes, bare skin and plainly expressed pleasure, but Breillat keeps returning to Drucker’s face instead of reducing the encounters to anatomical spectacle. It is sensual, uncomfortable and deliberately unsexy at the moments when fantasy gives way to consequences.