One of film’s disquieting pleasures is the way the medium offers its viewers the chance to experience a life that they themselves would never lead. The thought of an adult woman sleeping with her stepchild is wrong on so many levels. As director Catherine Breillat demonstrates in her 2023 film Last Summer (original French title: L’Été dernier), subjects that repulse on a visceral level can still elicit feelings from unexpected places.

Anne (Léa Drucker) is an attorney who works with at-risk children. Anne lives in a quiet town outside Paris with her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) and two adopted children. A self-proclaimed “gerontophile” (attracted to older people), Anne seems to enjoy her comfortable life, even with a little obvious distance from her husband, until Paul’s troubled seventeen-year-old son Théo (Samuel Kircher) comes to live with them.

Théo is the polar opposite of Paul, anti-social, mischievous, and charming. Théo bonds with the children while getting on Anne’s nerves, especially with Paul’s frequent work-related absences. Théo’s magic eventually takes hold, leading the adult woman to make the very bad and irresponsible choice to sleep with her stepson.

Based off the 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts, Breillat revels in the uncomfortable. Last Summer has numerous spicy scenes, played with an energy that orbits the realm of passion without ever really touching the surface. Something is clearly missing from Anne’s idyllic country life. Drucker plays Anne with such precision, a woman intoxicated by the thrill of the hunt without ever losing sight of the obvious destruction caused by her decisions.

Anyone can conjure up an image of the perfect life. Each of us might need to swap out some pieces to match the reality we can make for ourselves. Some of us don’t have much money, or the ability to have kids of our own. Sometimes the love we once shared with our spouse withers and dies. Breillat is fascinated not just with power dynamics, but with decay.

Kircher plays Théo with a perfect blend of charisma and tediousness. Théo’s boyish looks never compensate for the reality that he’s a clueless young kid. The justifications for Anne’s infatuation with him exist in her own head. Breillat never tries to defend her protagonist’s horrid behavior.

There is something weirdly alluring in watching the drama unfold. Théo’s penchant for drama precludes him from discretion. Anne’s excuses are hardly believable to anyone, except for those so caught up in the idea of the idyllic life that they’re willing to ignore the reality right there in front of them.

Drucker is agonizing. Anne is a truly tedious character, obsessed with the gaze that men, usually older, have bestowed upon her all her life. Stuck in a boring, quiet town, with nothing to amuse her beyond the children she adopted to fulfill that very purpose, she begins to fall apart, until the very second that the gaze returns. It’s ugly, but deeply human at the same time.

Life doesn’t always go the way we planned. You can’t control the actions of others, only the way that you choose to receive them. Breillat produces the film’s most compelling work when she homes in on that reality. Last Summer is an uncomfortable ride through its 104-minute, but there’s a lot of food for thought. You can piece together the model of an ideal existence fairly easily, but it takes much more effort to make it come alive.

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