Last Summer (2023, Catherine Breillat) (Patreon)

63/100

He gave her his heart and the very next day, she gave it away. (Obvious but irresistible.) Didn't discover until afterward that this film had previously been made in Denmark as Queen of Hearts, unseen by me; judging from the latter's Wiki-synopsis, Breillat devised a completely new ending but otherwise sticks closely to the original, which was pretty much tailor-made for her sensibility*. In any case, I was mostly exasperated by Last Summer's first half, which initiates a quasi-incestuous (he's her stepson) May-December affair with thudding predictability and sometimes comical clumsiness. Anne, responding to her husband's bodily self-consciousness following sex: "I'm a gerontophile, you know." Me, responding to inept ironic foreshadowing: "Yep, she's for sure gonna fuck the kid." Every aspect of the forbidden relationship itself feels tediously familiar, and newcomer Samuel Kircher seems thoroughly outmatched by Léa Drucker in their scenes together. Once Anne calls it off, however, and Theo takes revenge by telling his father, the movie shifts into a truly chilling portrait of almost psychopathic self-preservation, replete with extraordinary emotional hairpin turns (the cut from Anne storming out of the bedroom in phony indignation to being smother-hugged by her weeping, penitent husband took my breath away) and crushing verisimilitude (Anne can see on Pierre's face that he knows, but the subject remains painfully unaddressed throughout an entire evening, until after their young daughters are finally asleep). Dunno whether I'd prefer Queen of Hearts' more overtly tragic ending, but Breillat's is superb, with an ideally banal-yet-telling final exchange. Alas, the ice-cold magnificence of Last Summer's back half didn't retroactively make its ostensibly hot-and-heavy front half any less enervating. But I can imagine liking the film more—possibly a great deal more—upon second viewing, and judging from some friends' and Skandie voters' enthused reaction, there's probably gonna be one of those. 

* Surprisingly, it's not Breillat's version that features what appears to be unsimulated oral sex, though apparently Dyrholm in fact went down on a very realistic prosthesis. Pleading the fifth re: how I know about that despite not having seen the film. 

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: French title's L'été dernier..., with the closing ellipsis. As far as I can tell, though, Sideshow/Janus will be releasing it in the U.S. as simply Last Summer, no ellipsis.