Interview: Catherine Breillat on the Layers and Transgressions of ‘Last Summer’

“All I love is cinema,” Catherine Breillat proclaimed at the end of our extensive conversation. The legendary French filmmaker’s passion still burned brightly at the end of a long day of press while in town to present her newest work, Last Summer, at last year’s New York Film Festival. Breillat’s descriptions of her films were as detailed, thoughtful, and unexpected as the frames within them.

While the starting point of Last Summer might be the remaking of the 2019 Danish drama Queen of Hearts, the film bears Breillat’s distinctive stamp. In her hands, the story of an affair between working mother Anne (Léa Drucker) and her 17-year-old stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher), moves beyond the tawdriness and tension of its concept. The film feels in keeping with Breillat’s central obsession since her debut feature, 1976’s A Very Young Girl: women’s unshackling of their sexual desires from shame, be that stemming from age or any other factor.

Throughout our talk, Breillat spoke about how she imbued her personal experiences and ideologies into Last Summer. The effect is a transformation of the source material that changes little of its story. Be it an anecdote drawn from her own adolescent romantic dalliances or her acute observations about contemporary sexual politics, each carefully constructed image in the film carries the imprimatur of Breillat’s rigorous philosophical perspective.

During an interview that she carried well beyond our allotted time, Breillat candidly discussed image-making and intimacy, scandal and subversion, as well as denial and desire.

You’ve mentioned that this is your most accessible film and breaks the least taboos. Why make this now?

It still transgresses. A lot is happening with subtlety. You barely see it happen, while the others are a lot more frontal in their affront.

Is there any reason you wanted to make a movie like that?

Because I have exercised that kind of virtual transgression before, and now I wanted to manipulate a subject that might be hastily and summarily judged as obviously transgressive but to do it in a way that actually looks for the humanity of the character.

Adolescence is a common preoccupation in your work. Do you see the character of Théo as a new kind of teenager or someone entirely keeping with young people you’ve portrayed across the decades?

It’s a continuity because he is what I call “the absolute adolescent,” and he’s portrayed in Marivaux, Rousseau, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. And, in this way, he may not be so absolutely modern that he just speaks a vocabulary that is exactly of right now. That wouldn’t be interesting because that dialect would not be understood 10 years from now, whereas these feelings are eternal in time. That’s what’s interesting to me. That’s the twist. In literature and cinema, James Dean might be the absolute adolescent. Even though he still sort of ages somehow, something else in him remains. One must go after eternity, not fashion.

Anne talks about generations in the film. Her mother’s generation is that of sexual liberation, hers being of AIDS. What do you think Théo’s generation is?

I would say the generation of obstruction, all kinds of moral obstructions. When I was casting, I saw so many young men, and I realized they were terrified and really didn’t know how to parse out within themselves the difference between going up to a girl they liked or harassing her. In the kind of cultural sway that we’re in now, something much more nave and natural is in peril, and we should know that reciprocal attraction is something that we can recognize. And I think that’s what I show in the film, the evidence of certain reciprocal attractions and that there’s something there that’s essential to all human relations. Although it’s good, we have taught young boys not to brutalize and to respect women. Now we also have to come to the second step, which is to respect something that’s very core to our DNA, which is something to do with desire.

When you were around Théo’s age, you wrote an erotic novel, A Man for the Asking, that was considered too adult for you to be allowed to read. Is that yearning for the adult world before society thinks you are ready to experience something you connected to in the character?

You see the absurdity that young people are being erected rules for that are just a pure denial of reality. I’ve heard now that little girls apparently aren’t willing to be talked to about menstruation until the age of 12, but the problem is sometimes they get their period when they’re nine years old. So, what do we tell them [about them having] internal bleeding? That they’re dirty in some way? That it shouldn’t be discussed? We have to be very aware of puritanism and all its forms because it leads to sexual mortification, which leads to a form of self-affliction, which, in turn, not so paradoxically leads to perversion and perversity.

Your filmography is full of stories about young women seeking to expand their sexual horizons. Is that force of youth something that cuts across genders, or did you have to approach it differently with Théo in Last Summer?

There isn’t necessarily an adaptation to a different gender because they share a kind of candor that’s common to adolescents, which can start as early as 14 or 15. There are indoctrinations, perturbations, and hormonal changes that make desire a natural recourse. It’s in the absolute DNA of man as a human, and at stake is the survival of the species. So you see that there’s no perversion there. There’s nothing dirty or morally reprehensible, and it must be treated with the grandest form of simplicity. And also [you learn] to be aware that there can be multiple and varied expressions of desire. Maybe not all of them are as honorable as the other, but even so, there’s such goodness and safety in the secret of intimacy. It shouldn’t be everyone’s business to codify the secrets of the intimacies of others. The most important thing is to try to never be ashamed of any things that one has done. It hasn’t changed you, and it hasn’t damaged you.

Is the goal of your work to show it all even if it’s not honorable?

One of the main scenes of Romance is after the rape scene. She looks at herself in the mirror, and she persuades herself of her own integrity. I think it’s very important in the kinds of things that are happening now culturally where we say that we’re making men carry the shame, but that can’t be true if we’re asking women to commit to their victimhood forever. Of course, they’re victims in some sense, but we should allow them to move from there.

Some critics seemed to expect this film to have a shocking or confrontational element in line with your previous work. Is the lack of overt provocation itself a form of provocation? That perhaps in time, this will be seen as an entirely unsensational story of people acting in accordance with their desires?

I don’t provoke, I subvert. It’s a subversive thing to do to look at something without judgment. I never try to create a scandal, contrary to public opinion. When I wrote my first novel, I didn’t intend for it to be restricted for people under the age of 18. I myself was a virgin at the time and had no idea what I was talking about. The vocabulary I had borrowed from the men that I had been reading, and so all of this was borrowed material in the literary tradition where I first wrote in the first person for the men and then passed into the third person.

I was a baby when I wrote it, and there was no porn or anything like that to educate me. At the time, there was purely literature, and so I consider myself to be innocent of scandal. I don’t make scandal. I’m not scandalous. I am scandal, if anything. Works aren’t made to occur as scandals, but to be a work. So I really hate this vocabulary, too, because it’s never something that I’ve worked toward. On the contrary. Another word that I’ve been described as in France, which I very much despise, is the word “sulfurous.” It really only means a witch to be burned.

Was there a similar process of subversion in translating the original Danish film to make Last Summer?

Very much. The Danish film was very moralistic. In the original, though, there’s a lot more transgression than in mine.

When talking with Léa, I learned that you got coverage of both characters during the sexual encounters, but especially at the beginning, you mostly showed them from Théo’s perspective. Were more intrigued by his reaction, or were you trying to put the viewer in the point of view of Anne, or both?

First, there was the necessity of space. It was a very small room, so there were certain constraints in terms of what was possible to film. By raising the bed like this, we were able to film him from below. Because of the way that the room was arranged, it was very difficult to light and have the camera angles that would have made Léa beautiful for the scene. Whereas he’s 17, so he barely needs any makeup or light. So there was this pragmatic aspect of the way that the frame was completed. On top of that, it was important to have this first because they have four love scenes. We knew that we were going to see her and her orgasm a lot later, so that in the first scene, [it was important that] he be the one to be seen orgasming and coming for her—or of her, in a way—with these angelic features of his. Who knows, it might have been the first time that he ever slept with anyone. These are things that are possible, so that meant it’d be centered around him in the balance of the desire for that scene.

The last of the sex scenes drew some inspiration from Caravaggio. How did you come to see it in this way?

The last scene is my composition, and I’m very happy about it! I found it quite challenging because of how the [camera’s] travel went into the close-up. [I was] really constructing faces for these actors that we hadn’t seen before. Samuel in the scenes suddenly looks four years younger, like he’s 14. His lips are a little bit swollen; his nostrils are kind of flared; his eyelids are a little bit swollen. In the intensity of all of that, thankfully, my actors are very good that when I’m shouting directions at them, they stay within the scene. I was talking to them the whole way through because, at first, he had a line to say with his face burrowed in her neck. I thought he was never going to come out of there, so I was screaming, “Speak! Speak! Speak!”

Eventually, he ended up saying his line smiling, and you can see his teeth shining. Even then, he stayed with his head there, and he needed to take that up because I’m very quick to give instructions when I feel like the scene is starting to get stuck in the mud. Then, I told him to put his head back and put it against the wood behind him. He eventually did, yet still he kept his eyes closed mentally. He was never going to open his eyes, so I had to scream, “Open your eyes! Open his eyes!” And, eventually, he did. We get this face, this angelic, almost-14-year-old face of ecstatic admiration for her. He looks so fulfilled and so at peace, and I think that’s subversive.

He’s in an ecstatic state where he’s crazy with joy and love for her, and there, that’s a painting that looks like a 17th-century painting that I didn’t copy anywhere. I created it, and it was miraculous that she opened her hand, and we see the key in her hand. The timing was right, and so the entirety of the sequence is really miraculous. She has this big vein on her forehead…something is happening we don’t know between these two people.

You’ve said that you instructed Léa and Samuel to act as if they were both 15 years old. Do you think that immaturity is specific to Anne as a character, or do people never really outgrow adolescent notions of sexuality?

I think it’s a view of the mind to think that people are adults. I don’t know who really is an adult or if the mind ever stops growing. Because, in this way, adulthood would mean some kind of mummification or mortification. Whereas to be a teenager in this way, that starts to mean to wait for a miracle of life in every instance.

Adulthood is to be a “pre-corpse,” like the 33-year-old friend of her mother’s that Anne had a crush on as a young girl?

I couldn’t have invented that! In my first book, before A Man for the Asking, I wrote of this same man who’s not, in fact, my mother’s friend but really did exist. I was 18 at the time when I wrote this book, and I was going to these clubs where I was hanging around all these men. There was this one man I was very attracted to but also repulsed by, as I described. I found word for word exactly that same description of his skin and wrinkles. And then I read that it was 33 at the time, and that’s not something I could have made up if I hadn’t already written it.

I believe inventions don’t exist. I don’t think anybody invents anything. In French, we say we don’t invent anything ex nihilo. What we can do is put things in the wind, which is to say: Show the people things that are there that they hadn’t seen before, that they weren’t able to identify, that have always been under their gaze. And that’s what cinema is for. We can put a finger to what’s always been available for sight but not identifiable by most. And so, in my films, I never invent anything. I’m always recycling because I record constantly everything that I see and everyone that I meet. Whether it’s from the news or in reality, even dialogues are very often not invented but recycled, sometimes from conversations I had 50 years prior because I’m old now.

When Théo turns around and says in the movie, “You will see how jealous you’re going to be when I’m dating a girl who looks like this, that way I won’t desire you anymore,” that’s something that a 14-year-old boy said to me! He was the cousin of my husband and diabolically beautiful. Thankfully, I was very in love with my husband, which allowed me to resist the temptation. But if I remember how beautiful he was to this day, it really is saying something. He was a bit younger than the character is, and I was a bit younger than Léa was at the time, but that’s just an example of this recycling that comes from somewhere else.

When talking about Fat Girl in 2001 with Filmmaker, you observed, “I believe that it is in these simple stories that we reveal ourselves the most, and also hide the most.” What do you think we hide in Last Summer?

There’s a lot of denial in the film. There’s a lot about the lies one tells themselves. Everybody is constantly lying to themselves in the movie, starting with the teenager who says that feelings aren’t his thing. This is something I understand very well because when I was a teenager, I promised myself I wouldn’t fall in love until she was 19. I thought for a second I would marry the first man I ever loved. But then I remembered that when I was 12, I was in love with a 14-year-old little boy. We went to a mixed school, which would have been a big deal because most schools were segregated by gender. It was a boarding school, and there was a lot of surveillance. During every break between the classes, we had a set of boys upstairs standing at the door at the threshold of the door looking out for us so that we could stay and flirt. What does that mean to be considered a whore at the time for being 12 years old and flirting with a 14-year-old boy? I also wondered why I didn’t sleep with him then. It’s probably because he didn’t know I would have wanted to. But this entire question about sexuality and was it wrong…no, it was not!

So to continue on a thread on denial and the kind of simulations that occur, obviously, the husband’s denial is clear in choosing to believe in something obscuring what he knows is the truth. That’s what denial means: to override what one knows in order to survive. It’s a survival mechanism. It’s very, very important. And in the scene where Théo comes back from being sent off to boarding school, he comes and sees her in her office. She’s sitting there cold and legal-like, and he says, “I need my father to know the truth.” He isn’t saying the truth—he’s lying to himself. That’s a very important difference with the Danish film. The dialogue is identical, but in the Danish film, he’s speaking at face value and, in fact, stating what he wants.

In my film, he’s not stating what he wants. What he wants more than anything is her. He blackmails her because he’s trying to dominate the power dynamic that she, until then, has been dominating where she treats him like a kid and tells him that he’s gonna get over it in one second. She’s been so dismissive of him, and he’s trying to get power over her. But the entire thing is a scene of love. And in the end, it’s a very amorous form of behavior to lie to oneself in this way. By the end, she’s almost in tears as well. That’s really what amorous behavior is, lying to oneself and then yet still doing the worst thing one can do. And he does dominate her in ways. We see it as soon as the tattoo scene where she’s saying, “No, no,” but more in a kind of teenage amused way of saying no and in the end letting him do it. And the last scene at the gate is the same way. We hear her say stop with a normal, steady voice. But she keeps going.

Translation by Assia Turquier-Zauberman