L’Été Dernier
French drama by Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl) about a lawyer who begins a passionate relationship with her stepson. Remake of the Danish film Queen Of Hearts.
One of the world’s most consistently provocative filmmakers for nearly fifty years, Catherine Breillat proves with her incendiary, compelling new drama that she is not through toying with viewers’ comfort levels. In L’ÉTÉ DERNIER, Léa Drucker stars as Anne, a lawyer who specializes in cases of sexual consent and parental custody. Seemingly happily married to kind-hearted businessman Pierre with adopted twin daughters, Anne inexplicably finds herself drawn to Pierre’s estranged seventeen-year-old son Théo after the boy returns home to live with them. Embarking on a passionate affair with the teenager, Anne all too willingly thrusts herself into a maelstrom of attraction, intimidation, and manipulation.
Breillat’s incisive screenplay – cannily altered from the Danish thriller QUEEN OF HEARTS on which it’s based – elegantly surveys the situation’s extreme power dynamics while giving the brilliant Drucker the chance to create a character who exists entirely within her own moral boundaries. (source: New York Film Festival)