‘Last Summer’ Review: Catherine Breillat’s Scandal-Courting Drama Draws Yawns

thewrap.com:

Cannes Film Festival, where Catherine Breillat’s scandal-courting transgression drama mostly inspired yawns.More inert than inept, “Last Summer” arrived in Cannes with fraught expectations: This is Breillat’s first film in a decade and a faithful remake of May el-Toukhy’s acclaimed “Queen of Hearts” — and within the Venn diagram of cinephiles who impatiently awaited Breillat’s follow-up to 2013’s “Abuse of Weakness,” and journalists who reviewed and celebrated that 2019 Danish drama you could probably fit the entire Palais.Like a cover song that follows the same notes but changes the emphasis, “Last Summer” tracks a high-powered juvenile rights attorney who begins a taboo fling with her underage stepson.

The lawyer here is Anne (Léa Drucker, from “Custody”), a content and aloof mother of two who dulls her mid-life boredoms with wine.

After making love to her sixtyish husband she might call herself a “gerontophile,” complimenting Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) for his “lived in body that lost the firmness of youth,” but her eyes speak a different language when Pierre’s troubled son Theo (Samuel Kircher) comes to stay.As in the original version, “Last Summer” hints that Anne herself fell victim to adult predation as a child even younger than Pierre, but Breillat has little use for such cyclical pathology and would bristle at the word “predation.” Indeed, the French filmmaker’s main overhaul is to remove the psychological dimension altogether, focusing instead on the physical expression of desire.

Anne’s face and body move one way when Pierre gets down to business with the same absentmindedness he used to gulp down a plate of lasagna and a glass of scotch just minutes before, and in manners wholly different when the son takes.