Last Summer, Queen of Hearts

Samuel Kircher and Léa Drucker

I was about halfway through Catherine Breillat's Last Summer (L'Été dernier) when it finally dawned on me that it was a remake of a Danish film I saw a few years ago, May el-Touky's Queen of Hearts. In both films, the attorney wife of a successful, if somewhat boring business man has a fling with her teenaged step-son. Both films are well acted and appointed, but I thought Ms. el-Touky and her collaborators did a better job of coming to grips with the implications of the material than the makers of the French film.

Ms. Breillat quickly and forcefully establishes her female protagonist, Anne, played by Léa Drucker, as capable and compassionate in her profession. She has a warm relationship with her older husband and their two adorable adopted daughters. The only fly in the ointment is surly step-son, Theo, who is living with them after getting tossed out of his Geneva boarding school. However, after we see the perfunctory sex between Anne and her husband, the audience knows it is only a matter of time before Theo and Anne cross the Rubicon of transgressive love. 

As Theo, Samuel Kircher is appealing in his youthful cluelessness. Ms. Drucker is adept at showing both the steel and vulnerability of Anne. Ms. Breillat is successful at both evoking and sending up the French bourgeoise (or as Anne calls them normopaths) here, a scene with Anne and her charges riding through the French countryside in a Mercedes convertible while blasting Sonic Youth's "Dirty Boots" is both sublime and ridiculous, but she skirts the issue of what results when society's spoken and unspoken laws are trangressed. Abuse is papered over in Last Summer and treated with silence. Perhaps this accurately reflects Ms. Breillat's feelings towards how French society deals with such issues, but, compared to how Queen of Hearts deals head on with damage done by social ruptures, it is a cop-out.