SYNOPSIS
​Follows Anne, a brilliant lawyer who lives with her husband Pierre and their daughters. Anne gradually engages in a passionate relationship with Theo, Pierre's son from a previous marriage, putting her career and family life in danger.

"L’été dernier (Last Summer) marks director Catherine Breillat’s return to cinema after a 10-year long hiatus. Best known for her provocative films of the early 2000s such as Romance, Fat Girl (A ma soeur), and Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l’enfer), Breillat herself sees this long-awaited return as a ‘synthesis of all of her work,’ as it deals with themes that are integral to her filmmaking: morality, sexuality, & transgression.
The film, a remake of 2019 Danish drama Queen of Hearts, follows newly-married Anne (Lea Drucker) who moves in with her husband and his 17 year old stepson Theo (Samuel Kirchner). The two begin a tumultuous and secretive relationship, one which, in true Breillat-nature, is tinged with obsession and disillusion.
Catherine Breillat’s films have been banned in countless countries; she is not one to shy away from the taboo, the perverse, the shocking. But, neither is she one to shock simply for the sake of shocking. Instead, with L’été dernier, she lends an inquisitive and poetic eye to the ever-complicated and always-universal nature of desire-–and the darkness that surrounds it."

​(from the introduction to the film by Jessica Lovett, graduate student in French & Francophone Studies)



"Perhaps some of you have come out on this Tuesday evening to watch a scandalous, provocative film true to the style of Catherine Breillat. As if subverting that very expectation, L’été dernier (Last Summer), her first film in 10 years, is rumoured to be her least pornographic one thus far. This is not to say that this film will not be transgressive, or that it won’t, at least at some crucial points, shock you. In an interview at the New York Film Festival, Breillat recalls that it is these thematics that first made her popular in America, for audiences believed she was brave enough to show what they had been forced to repress thus far. That fire of her early films about morality and sexuality is present in the synopsis itself: a newly-married woman, Anne, moves in with her husband and her 17-year-old stepson, Theo. Putting her career and conjugal life at risk, she begins a secret, deceptive relationship with Theo. Dissatisfied with the usual understanding of her own project as one about sex and lies, Breillat emphasises that her own interest is in a different kind of a transgression: a lie not told to one’s husband or family (for we already know it), but a lie told to oneself. In this remake, she transforms the dark, heavy 2019 Danish drama Queen of Hearts not by changing a single line in the script but by changing what those lines mean with her camera––her own transgression. This film, for her, is not only about a revelation of intimate desires, but about the “ultra-intimate” (in her words) that is impossible to reveal to oneself. So I leave you with the only trigger warning Breillat herself would give you: this film is about love."

(from the introduction to the film by Urvi Vora, graduate student in Modern Culture and Media)