Filmmaker Catherine Breillat ( ) has long made sex and female desire her central subjects, variously examining sexual awakening, sexual taboos, and transgressive habits in her work. Breillat’s latest, , concerns all three: Centered on a middle-aged lawyer, Anne (Léa Drucker), and her tempestuous love affair with her 17-year-old stepson, Theo (Samuel Kircher), the film explores the limits of desire, testing its viewers’ boundaries at the same time. After a decade-long absence from filmmaking—it’s become increasingly difficult to secure funding due to what’s seen as the disturbing nature of her films, according to the director—Breillat has returned to the screen with renewed vigor.
“I couldn’t live without cinema—in fact, I wasn’t alive,” she reflects of that fallow period. It was Saïd Ben Saïd, a producer of Ira Sachs’s (2023) and much of Paul Verhoeven’s work, “who brought me back to life, resuscitated me,” by suggesting Breillat adapt the 2019 Danish film as her next project. That film and Breillat’s follow the same straightforward plotline: The illicit couple is discovered, and Anne goes to great lengths to preserve her marriage.
Yet where the original hinged on overt moral judgments, Breillat’s version strips much of that away, allowing the story to unfold in a more ambiguous—and distinctly unsettling—manner. “When you adapt a film, you are making it your own,” Breillat asserts. One way that she’s done this is by shifting t.
