1 star
Who knew sex on the big screen could be so dull?
Directed by 75-year-old French filmmaker Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl, The Last Mistress), her first film in a decade, Last Summer tells the story of a seemingly happy couple, Anne and Pierre (Léa Drucker and Olivier Rabourdin), whose idyllic upper-crust life is thrown into turmoil when the husband’s son from his first marriage, Théo (Samuel Kircher), arrives on the scene and before you can say Mon Dieu, he and his stepmom are making the beast with two backs.
Considering the implications of their act, one would expect a little soul-searching before their clothes hit the floor, or at least enough of a story arc to make the audience believe that theirs is a soul-consuming passion they can’t deny. We’ve already seen Anne have passionless sex with Pierre in an earlier scene – he rolls on top of her without even as much as a kiss and starts to pump away while she tells him about having a crush on an older man (age 33) when she was 14 that both intrigued and repulsed her. It was not exactly a night of passion for either of them. So we can understand – even hope – that her encounter with the forbidden fruit of her stepson will be a fantastic, if guilt-ridden, experience for Anne.
It’s not. It’s the dullest copulation this side of a Times Square stag loop, and when a guilty Ann tells her stepson that it can never happen again, the audience almost applauds her decision. With another hour before the final credits roll, Breillat uses the rest of the movie to explore the ramifications of the act by playing with the audience’s expectations in exciting and provocative ways. Without giving anything away, suffice it to say that secrets are revealed, lies are told, and stands are taken. It’s all exhilarating, but only intellectually because the people involved are so unappealing. There is an absolute lack of screen chemistry between Drucker and Rabourdin and Drucker and Kircher that not only makes their sexual encounters feel forced but their lives out of the bedroom shallow and meaningless. You don’t care what happens to them; you just want it to happen quickly.
