From her controversial 1976 directorial debut “A Real Young Girl” to even more confrontational later works like “Romance” (1999) and “Anatomy of Hell” (2004), French auteur Catherine Breillat has long been one of the cinema’s premier chroniclers of desire in all its complexities and contradictions. Her latest film , “ Last Summer ,” is one of her best, a riveting and nuanced portrayal of an affair between an attorney ( Léa Drucker ) and her 17-year-old stepson (Samuel Kircher) that’s paced like a languorous Éric Rohmer dramedy but grips the audience like a thriller. It’s a remake of the Danish movie “Queen of Hearts,” and while the script by Breillat and Pascal Bonitzer provides “ Last Summer ” with meticulously crafted dialogue, characterizations, and situations, it’s only a starting point; the greatness of the film is in the visual execution, which is just as Breillat intended.
“One mistake that people often make is they confuse the script with the film,” Breillat told IndieWire. “The script is just a tool, first and foremost to convince everyone — the actors, the producers, the financiers, yourself — that the movie is possible. But once you get to set, everything changes because the words have to become flesh, and every actor changes forever the film that’s being made.
” One of the most interesting examples of how Breillat and the actors transform the meaning of the text on set comes in a scene where the stepson confronts hi.
