A decade ago, when the Wolfie Wars were being fought—with critics charging that Martin Scorsese’s “ ” condoned the exuberant protagonist’s stock-market fraud—I averred that any viewer who needed to hear Scorsese denounce such crimes in order to understand that they were wrong was already a lost cause. The same holds, even more strongly, for Catherine Breillat’s new film, “Last Summer,” regarding the incestuous relationship that it depicts. The central character, Anne (Léa Drucker), is a lawyer specializing in child protection; her husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), a businessman, has a seventeen-year-old son, Théo (Samuel Kircher), from a previous marriage.
Théo has been living with his mother in Geneva, but, after getting into trouble for assaulting a teacher, he comes to live with Anne and Pierre (and their two young adopted daughters) in their large and lavish house in a Paris suburb. Soon, Anne and Théo begin a sexual relationship. Anne knows it’s wrong and dangerous, and she exhorts Théo to keep quiet about it—but he doesn’t.
And I leave it to you, dear readers, to decide who ends up happy in the fallout. Some commentators in France have accused Breillat of depicting this relationship favorably. Most prominently, the novelist Christine Angot has denounced the film as “an aestheticization of incest.
” Angot’s critique, broadcast on Radio France last September, is also an intriguing self-questioning. She says that, when she first sa.
