L’Été dernier

After exactly a decade, this unnerving return to cinema from French provocateur Catherine Breillat revisits and rewrites Danish filmmaker May el-Toukhy’s 2019 Queen of Hearts. Its premise centers on Anne (Léa Drucker), a successful lawyer who lives in a villa on the outskirts of Paris with her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) and their two adopted daughters. A relatively uneventful, though contented, suburban existence is disrupted when Théo (Samuel Kircher, in his first role), Pierre’s troubled 17-year-old son from a previous marriage comes to live with the couple. Finding herself the object of the tousled-haired, frequently shirtless teen’s attentions, an impossible-to-resist sexual attraction threatens Anne’s career and her marriage. A vibrant contribution to a career-long exploration of female desire, Breillat’s brilliant interpretation sees the affair as simultaneously passionate, exciting, disgusting and absurd – a relationship rooted in fantasy, while its potential repercussions are terrifyingly real. (AFI Fest)