The Awful Ferocity of Midlife Desire
The protagonist of Last Summer, a lawyer named Anne (played by Léa Drucker), lives in the Gallic version of a Nancy Meyers utopia: a resplendent French country home with parquet floors, velvet throw pillows, and the faintest hum of ennui. Anne dresses in shades of cream—she’s a woman who never spills so much as a drop. She drives a vintage Mercedes convertible. She represents girls who are being or have been abused, with alternating ferocity and tenderness. Early in the movie, Anne’s 17-year-old stepson moves into her home, and his surly, careless presence instantly disrupts her controlled environment. Théo (Samuel Kircher) leaves behind overflowing ashtrays and dirty socks; he steals from her purse and walks around half-naked, like a rangy, disaffected teen idol. But where the standard Meyers heroine would fuss herself into a fugue state of approbation, Anne remains oddly unruffled. Does she … like Théo? Is she secretly enjoying watching her perfect home get all scuffed up and sullied?
Anne is inscrutable, as the director Catherine Breillat’s heroines usually are, but there are clues dropped like pearls throughout the movie. Last Summer, a remake of a Danish film, is the 75-year-old auteur’s first project in a decade. Starting in the 1960s, when she released a novel so explicit at the age of 17 that she was technically too young to buy it, Breillat’s mission has been, as the writer Chris Kraus once observed, to “exhume the unspeakable ‘horror’ of hetero-female identity and look at it, coolly.” She digs into the matter of female sexuality with the detached commitment of your average ob-gyn. In 1999’s Romance, a young teacher whose boyfriend refuses to sleep with her goes on an epic, self-hating quest of sexual exploration and degradation. Fat Girl, from 2021, is about a homely 12-year-old whose own nascent sexuality is formed as she watches her sister be coerced into losing her virginity to a law student. Breillat is the opposite of sentimental. “I’m a feminist,” she has said, “but not in my films.” She crosses all and any lines—Romance famously featured what was supposedly an unsimulated sex scene between the lead actress and the porn star Rocco Siffredi—in service of considering what women being so consistently hated and feared as sexual objects does to their own desire.
Last Summer is my favorite of Breillat’s movies to date, because its allegiance to aesthetics collides with its story in a way that feels bracingly confrontational and unrepentant. Anne begins a sexual relationship with Théo after he kisses her, and she starts to manipulate him with the finesse of someone who’s dealt with groomed teenagers throughout her career. Their relationship proceeds as a series of incremental breaches, each more damaging than the last. After he pushes her head underwater while she’s swimming with her daughters, she dunks him with real effort and savagery. Anne allows Théo to caress her wrist while they’re discussing tattoos, then to brand a small stick-and-poke triangle in the crook of her elbow. In the middle of a dull lunch party, she rides away with him on a motorized scooter, and while the pair drink in a bar, she tells him how, for her generation, the AIDS crisis abruptly ended what the sexual revolution had started. “A window had opened,” Anne says; “it slammed shut.” After they have sex for the first time, she buys him a new computer. When Théo seems at one point as though he might pose a threat to her, she dismantles his credibility with brutal, surgical precision.
That all of this happens against a backdrop of astonishing cinematic beauty is perfectly intentional. Like Keats, Breillat believes that beauty is a kind of truth, even if it isn’t real. The swimming scene is a symphony in shades of green: rustling grasses, rippling water, willow trees. A family of swans glides serenely in the background. Théo’s youth and impulsiveness—cruelly contrasted against the paunchy tedium of his father—unlock some of Anne’s own impulses, long buried by a life that can’t accommodate them. Having recently read Miranda July’s novel All Fours, like virtually every other woman I know, I found Last Summer to be a necessary companion piece, as intentional and meticulous as July’s novel is curious and self-effacing. Both works have the same thesis: The state of midlife, for women, is a kind of second (or third) adolescence, a coming-into-age identity crisis that roils with hormones and exploration and discontent. More crucial, the intensity with which both artists render midlife desire makes it entirely incompatible with the confines of the traditional domestic setup. When home is no longer enough, where are women supposed to go?
I’ve recently been wondering whether the extreme bifurcation of my own life—as a person who sporadically manifests as a polished avatar of my job but more frequently experiences reality as a disheveled emergency contact and folder of socks—is entirely mentally healthy, which is to say All Fours hit me with the force of a bullet train. Its unnamed narrator, like July, is an acclaimed and semifamous artist who has dealt with the demands of motherhood and creative work by cutting them entirely off from one another. “I try to keep most of myself neatly contained off-site,” she explains in the first chapter. “In the home I focus on turning the wheel of the household so we can enjoy a smooth, healthy life without disaster or illness.” Her self-abnegation is so fierce that she keeps a pee bottle in her home office so she can maintain a flow state without interrupting her nanny and getting drawn back into the domestic realm. Both sexual fantasy and relief, for her, have an absurd, escapist quality. When she unexpectedly gets a financial boost—by selling a sentence about hand jobs to a liquor company for $20,000—she plans a solo cross-country road trip, unhitched from errands and obligation.
Freedom, though, can be destabilizing. After making prolonged eye contact with a 30-something man named Davey who washes her windshield, she checks into a motel, abandons her trip, and embarks on an interlude of possessed sexual fantasy and baroque creative experimentation. She pays Davey’s wife, the assistant to an interior designer, the entirety of her liquor check to transform her motel room into a nurturing, opulent, fiscally reckless temple of beauty and pleasure. (“Some of our key words are Brunelleschi, burgundy, persimmon, dahlias, and tonka bean,” the designer explains.) “Who really knows why anyone does anything?” the narrator thinks. Unbeknownst to her, she’s in the middle of perimenopause, with its accompanying hormonal fluctuations, but nevertheless she becomes fixated on the idea that her sexual life and desirability are fast approaching a cliff from which there is no return.
The title of Last Summer alludes to the same sense of finality—Anne takes a dangerous chance because she may not be offered another. But she shares with July’s narrator a kind of tamed wildness, an incompleteness of self in her adopted surroundings. The only music in the movie is diegetic, when Anne blasts jagged, disorienting rock from her car. She has dark, feral impulses that seem to have been suppressed for years by the need to support her marriage and raise her adopted daughters. In a conversation with Théo, she alludes to an assault in her youth, and an abortion that left her unable to bear children. Her biggest fear, she explains, is “for everything to disappear. Or, worse, for me to do all I can for everything to disappear,” by, it’s implied, doing something so self-sabotaging that it will destroy her. Both her profession and her life have taught her how cruel the world can be to girls, and that misogyny forces so many of them to grow up before they should. (Anne’s sister’s ex-partner, a comically droopy sad sack who reneges on his most basic parenting obligations, exposes how different things can be for men.)
Who might Anne have become if she hadn’t been conditioned into life as a controlled, efficient, immaculate lawyer, mother, and wife? What might she want? Lurking in the background of the movie is the suggestion that whatever horrific act was inflicted upon her in her youth caused a rupture in her psyche, and turned her away from herself. Breillat focuses on the faces of her actors well past the point of discomfort, and in Anne’s first sexual encounter with Théo, all we see is him—his youth, his gawkiness, his naivete—in a way that makes watching the scene feel unbearable. Anne’s abuses are all too obvious. But in the second encounter, Breillat stays on Anne’s face, contorted by perspective into a strange, grotesque expression. She is entirely unlike the character we’ve seen until now. Turned as far away from both Théo and the camera as she can be, she’s thinking only of herself.
Is it so strange that Anne, having had her earliest forays into sexuality clipped by the AIDS crisis and assault, would internalize freedom as something that gratifies her while hurting someone else? What kind of alternatives has she ever been presented with? We rarely face the extent to which culture has shaped what we want even before we know we want it: The most powerful moment in All Fours, for me, is when the narrator has to reckon with her innate assumptions that sexuality for women has an expiration date. “We should be allowed one year during perimenopause to be free, knowing the end is coming,” her friend Mary tells her. “It’s such a dangerous time, right before the window closes.”
And yet the motel room the narrator creates—a pink, fragrant, sensual womb of her own—is not an end but a beginning, a place where she’s able to find what she describes as “oneness,” and where all the distinct elements of her identity are welcomed and indulged. The room is a true home: without obligation, or errands, or the need for self-suppression. The narrator’s queerness, which her domestic setup previously had no space for, is acknowledged here, as is her artistic soul. At home, she thinks, “I was a throbbing, amorphous ball of light trying to get my head around a motherly, wifely human form.” The hormonal disequilibrium of perimenopause allows her to understand how poorly this role fits her.
But the thrill of All Fours also lies in the narrator’s boldness, in the expansiveness of her thinking. She’s empowered enough by her status and imagination to create something wholly new. In Last Summer, Breillat is characteristically gloomy about Anne’s future prospects for happiness, and yet the director’s unwillingness to judge endows the movie with its tension. Anne acts monstrously, but in a way that exposes how fragile her perfectionist identity has always been, built out of expectation rather than choice. “There are certain things that are forbidden for women,” Breillat once explained of her movies. “I want to show these things, explore them beyond their limits … If you consider that this is a provocation, this is what I do.”