Last Summer (L'été Dernier)

 

Director Catherine Breillat

LAST SUMMER (L'été Dernier)       B-                                                                                 France  Norway  (104 mi)  2023  d: Catherine Breillat

Since I’m an artist, I don’t have to be politically correct.                                                                —Catherine Breillat, Catherine Breillat: Asia Argento Is a Traitor and I don't ... 

The kind of film you’ll see made only in France, which has a tradition of summer movies that spin out of control in dizzying fashion, as it fits their sensibility of lurid provocation causing considerable outrage.  There’s a contentious aspect to all the films of this director, where fantasy always plays a large role, typically female fantasies in the context of a patriarchal society, and this is no different, as she enjoys exploring the edge of moral turpitude, literally normalizing taboo subjects, feeling very comfortable with the uncomfortable.  Described by Beatrice Loyaza in her Film Comment interview (Interview: Catherine Breillat on Last Summer) in the fall of 2023 as “the high priestess of errant female sexuality.  Throughout her career, she has continued to ruffle feathers, be it with her austere visions of (unsimulated) sex (Romance, 1999) or with her unflinchingly violent portrayals of sexual initiation (Fat Girl, 2001),” while actress Asia Argento, who worked with her on THE LAST MISTRESS (2007), fed up with her aversion to the #MeToo movement while publicly defending serial rapist Harvey Weinstein after more than 80 women made allegations of sexual harassment or rape against him, described Breillat as “the most sadistic and downright evil director I’ve ever worked with (French Filmmaker Catherine Breillat Calls Actress Asia ...).”  Coming after a period of not making any films in a decade, the 76-year old director, novelist, and European Graduate School film professor chose to do a literal French remake of May el-Toukhy’s edgy Danish film QUEEN OF HEARTS (2019), working for the first time with cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie, who began her career shooting André Téchiné's remarkable Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages) (1994), with a screenplay written by Breillat and Pascal Bonitzer, which premiered at Cannes in 2023.  The scandalous story recalls the moral transgressions of Woody Allen’s infamous love affair with Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his former partner Mia Farrow, who discovered nude photographs of Previn in Allen’s home, yet they ended up in a marriage that still stands the test of time, despite a more than thirty year age difference between them, while also recalling the tabloid sensation of Todd Haynes’ 2023 Top Ten List #9 May December, which subverts the typical male predator role into a female.  Women and female desire have been a consistent element of Breillat's work, where part of equality of the sexes is an understanding that they’re both equally capable of carrying out the same kind of crimes, including crimes of passion, where certainly one of the goals of this film is to reverse gender norms.  In this regard, Breillat distinguishes herself, as she refuses to render judgment on either party, but instead presents a quasi-realist take on a particularly dark subject matter, as a torrid sexual relationship develops between a fifty-year old woman Anne (Léa Drucker, from Xavier Legrand’s 2017 Top Ten List #7 Custody (Jusqu'à la garde) and Lukas Dhont’s Close in 2022), and her self-absorbed, emotionally remote 17-year old stepson Théo (Samuel Kirchner, the son of actress Irène Jacob and younger brother of Paul Kirchner from Christophe Honoré’s 2023 Top Ten List #6 Winter Boy (Le Lycéen), who was originally cast in the role), bearing some physical resemblance to Björn Andrésen, the beautiful boy portrayed in Luchino Visconti’s DEATH IN VENICE (1971).  The French have a term for it, amour fou, an uncontrollable or obsessive passion, succumbing to the power of the flesh over reason, often with an accompanying sense of doom.  With no real audience connection to any of the characters, and her usual lack of subtlety or grace, not really her strong suit, Breillat turns the screws in making this as disturbing and as uncomfortable as possible, yet still quintessentially French, turning this into a bonafide horror movie, with a lie at the heart of the picture, intentionally left ambiguous, without a trace of melodrama, though it can feel contrived and over-the-top, bordering on bombastic, where Breillat’s characters have a history of making bad decisions and constantly lying to themselves, while the unsettling nature of the fallout can leave viewers with a sinking feeling.

Listed at #9 on Cahiers du Cinéma: Top Ten Films of 2023, and #5 by John Waters, this is an elevated family drama with a pernicious undercurrent of forbidden love, where it brings to mind Bernardo Bertolucci’s LUNA (1979), an incestuous love story between an opera singer (Jill Clayburgh) and her drug-addicted 15-year-old son, something Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky described as “monstrous, cheap, vulgar rubbish."  What makes this so abhorrent is Anne’s profession, as she’s a French juvenile rights attorney for sexually abused minors, so she’s used to seeing the traumatic harm inflicted by adults onto children, where the profound impact is not just heartbreaking, but emotionally devastating.  So she’s a gatekeeper for damaged youth, a protector from salacious and injurious acts, where the psychological damage is long-lasting and incomprehensibly toxic.  With that introductory backdrop, what follows is a cautionary tale that takes us down a rabbit hole of aberrant behavior.  Théo has been living with his mother in Geneva, but after getting kicked out of school for assaulting a teacher, this problem child comes to live with Anne and her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), along with their two young adopted Asian daughters Angela (Angela Chen) and Serena (Serena Hu), in an immense home on the heavily forested outskirts of Paris.  Pierre has business connections that require extensive travel, harboring a guilty conscience about not being there during Théo’s childhood, still having a distant relationship, with a brooding Théo remaining socially aloof, continually glued to his phone, seen moping in his room, and not really interacting with anyone.  His emotional volatility creates a negative impression, regarded as an irritant, where he just doesn’t give a damn about anyone else.  When Anne discovers he’s the likely culprit in a break-in, his self-centered attitude doesn’t sit well with her, so she attempts to set him straight, but in doing so opens herself up, spending time together during one of her husband’s prolonged absences, even allowing him to give her a small, homemade tattoo on her forearm, a completely unlikely scenario that leads to kisses and a passionate embrace, where it’s clear she has crossed the line of acceptable behavior.  As improbable as it sounds, she allows herself to get caught up in forbidden desires, suddenly reliving her lost youth in the pastoral bliss of summer, echoing Agnės Varda’s KUNG-FU MASTER! (1988), perhaps best expressed in a vintage Mercedes convertible drive out in the countryside set to the music of Sonic Youth, Sonic Youth - Dirty Boots (Revised Audio) YouTube (5:06), which is like an engine gearing up for a heightened impact.  This rebellious spirit emboldens them both, suddenly free to defy the odds and ignore all the warning signs, breaking down all moral boundaries, simply plunging into the forbidden zone, Here is an exclusive clip from French provocateur Catherine ... YouTube (2:20).  On the other hand, Anne is rarely seen without a glass of wine in her hand, potentially clouding her judgment, yet if audiences know anything about her it is that she of all people should know better, something we are constantly reminded of throughout the film.  Based on this knowledge, it’s hard to view her as a sexual predator, and she has multiple opportunities to break it off, but succumbs instead to her lustful instincts at the expense of everything else, all happening right under the nose of her husband, where this is a film that prioritizes the carnal part of the relationship rather than the havoc it could wreak, but the sex scenes play out almost entirely as close-ups on faces rather than naked bodies.  The moral hypocrisy is hard to miss, especially having seen the emotional fragility of the young girls Anne represents, yet she continually places herself in the most compromising positions, falling into an ethical free fall where rules are simply thrown out the window.  It’s hard to view this as anything other than arrogance and self-righteousness, as if this is her God-given right.      

The film is told almost completely through Anne’s perspective, allowing viewers to actually get inside her head, which adds a subversive layer to the experience.  And while this illicit couple sneak around behind the backs of adults, they are discovered by her sister Mina (Clotilde Courau), who has had her own difficult struggles in life and is truly disgusted by what she sees, as her sister is someone Mina could lean on for advice and support.  Théo doesn’t care if they get discovered, as he’s not connected to anyone or anything, but Anne has her family and career to think about, where she is jeopardizing both.  In a beautiful outdoor setting for lunch, the unsuspecting Pierre discusses taking his son for a little one-on-one time together, thinking it’s exactly what he needs, as we see Théo’s shirtless frame hovering in the background, like you see in the horror films, Last Summer (L'Été Dernier) new clip official from Cannes ... YouTube (1:31), suggesting Anne is in deeper trouble than she thinks, where the amped up tension is thick, knowing how this could open Pandora’s Box.  Upon his return, Pierre reveals his son’s startling allegations, but rather than confront the reality of her own behavior, Anne instead pretends nothing happened and doubles down on the cover up, coldly pretending it’s all a vile lie espoused by a mixed-up kid who’s trying to get back at his father for not being there for him.  The further down the road we go, the uglier and more loathsome it feels, revealing an unseemly side of the power dynamics of middle class entitlement, with Anne banking on her contention that no one will believe a troubled kid over a seasoned adult professional, where the irony is not lost on us, coming from a woman who advocates for minors, “Nobody will believe you.  You’re not credible.”  While that may be her viewpoint, it is certainly not that of the viewing audience, who are appalled at what we see, as she has betrayed not only her marriage and parental responsibilities, but also everything that her profession stands for.  Thoroughly capable of committing the same crimes as men, Anne privileges female pleasure in a way that is not only problematic, but treads rather murkily into rape territory, if not legally then certainly metaphorically.  In France, the legal age of consent is fifteen-years old, so the real taboo is incest, which applies to sexual relationships between children under 18 and their stepparents. Breillat portrays the situation with little to no judgment, even when things fall apart under the stress of outside scrutiny, but for viewers this becomes fertile grounds for horror, filled with self-deceptions, accentuated by Anne’s defiant lies and her insistent denial of any and all responsibility, essentially subverting the truth, completely blind to the ramifications, where in the end there is a general acceptance of the unacceptable.  That may be the real horror.  Who knew she would become the wicked stepmother, often seen in a devious light in fairy tales (The myth of the evil stepmother - BBC).  It shows that people of a privileged social class will resort to anything, lies, hypocrisy, or even smear tactics to defend their bourgeois lifestyles.  As a point of contention, Breillat’s own attitude towards this film bears some scrutiny, describing at a Cannes press conference that what transpires is “pure love” (Catherine Breillat Talks Taboo-Breaking Cannes film Last ...), as there is a certain romanticization in the relationship of Anne and Théo, though it couldn’t be less about “love,” as it’s so self-centered and destructive, exuding no faith in each other, or any existing humanity, with Breillat also suggesting there is no abuse, that “All of my characters are innocent” (State of Grace: Catherine Breillat on Last Summer), describing those who negatively pass moral judgment on their affair as “the ayatollahs.”  Similarly, she has spoken out against intimacy coordinators, describing them as “stupid” while also comparing them to the Taliban (Awful #metoo extremism is worse than McCarthyism).  In this instance, the director may be her own worst enemy, as her instincts for lacking any moral compass are a dangerous position for any artist, actually recalling the reaction of the Julianne Moore character in MAY DECEMBER, where a 34-year old teacher pleaded guilty to having sex with a 12-year old 6th grade student, yet in her mind she viewed statutory rape as a Shakespearean romance of star-crossed lovers, veering into a delusional psychopathic understanding, with French novelist Christine Angot similarly denouncing Breillat’s film as “an aestheticization of incest.”  As the Rohmeresque title indicates, this is one of Breillat’s lightest films, only showing what she wants us to see, yet by the end, the heavy storm clouds are lurking on the distant horizon.

Ride in the Whirlwind

Director Monte Hellman

Writer, co-producer, and actor Jack Nicholson

Lake Powell in Glen Canyon today

RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND          B                                                                                     USA  (82 mi)  1966  d: Monte Hellman

Shot back-to-back with The Shooting (1966) in the Utah desert outside Kanab during a combined six-week shooting in 1965, each given a $75,000 budget by legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman with a crew of just seven people, both shot by cinematographer Gregory Sandor, who would go on to shoot the cross-country road movie Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) as well, each one conceived by young American director Monte Hellman before he established himself in the industry, yet what’s noteworthy is that the reddish Glen Canyon setting for this film no longer exists, as all of their locations are currently submerged under several hundred feet of water by a man-made reservoir, Lake Powell.  Though the film was screened at the San Francisco Film Festival in the fall of 1966, it failed to interest U.S. film distributors and never obtained an American theatrical release until 1972, and was instead immediately sold to television, though it was shown out of competition at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival and played theatrically in France for six months in 1969, where it gained cult success on the French arthouse circuit, well received and critically acclaimed, endorsed by the editorial staff of the prestigious Cahiers du Cinéma, describing the film as “something new and original,” bringing attention to Hellman abroad before he was recognized in America.  By the early 60’s, westerns were already starting to be given a different look in Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962), John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962),  and David Miller’s vastly underrated LONELY ARE THE BRAVE (1962), while Sergio Leone started the spaghetti western craze with A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964).   Hellman eschewed widescreen compositions that capture the expansive panoramic landscapes of the American West, as was the custom at the time, and instead narrowed the focus to accentuate the tense claustrophobic anxiety.  Hellman studied drama at Stanford, then film at UCLA, taking a job as an apprentice film editor at ABC Studios, but he also founded the Theatergoers Company, and with financial help from Corman staged the Los Angeles premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, turning it into a western with Pozzo as a Texas rancher and Lucky as a Native-American Indian.  Not so much a story, but more of a collection of incidents and character studies, what’s so essential about this film is that it completely subverts the western genre, which typically glorifies the good guys against the bad guys, with a heroic hero at the center leading the action, usually a character audiences can sympathize with.  In this film you’d be hard pressed to find a hero, while dialogue and action sequences are minimized to the bare essentials.  What that means is that the story is advanced through visuals, which simply was not done at the time, becoming more in line with an art film, and a predecessor to the dour fatalistic excursions of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969).  The minimalist script was actually written by Jack Nicholson, who was also a co-producer and lead actor in the film, creating an ambiguous moral drama about frontier justice and how easily it was to be swept away by an ingrained culture of incessant violence, where the motto may as well have been “shoot first and ask questions afterwards.”  With similarities to the lynch mob hysteria in William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), both are spare and uncompromising, yet also elusive to the core, where this reveals a couple of innocent cowhands who mistakenly get swept up in a bloodthirsty posse’s push for vigilante justice.  The wide open spaces of the American frontier are a fertile ground for lawlessness and indiscriminate killing, where the barrel of a gun sets the tone for the absence of justice. 

Both Hellman films are considered to be the earliest examples of a revisionist acid Western that brought contemporary 60’s counterculture ideologies into the classic realms of western lore, and while both are quiet films, accentuating the interpersonal relationships between a few people, they’re also very different films, where the grim, fatalistic tone reflects the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination.  The Shooting, written by Carole Eastman, features Warren Oates in his first starring role butting heads with a ruthless female protagonist (Millie Perkins), becoming altogether abstract, uncompromising, and hallucinogenic in its fatalistic, existential moral ambiguities.  But don’t be fooled by the supposed critical favoritism heaped upon The Shooting, declaring it the masterpiece between the two, more challenging in its minimalist structure, with its relentless expression of existential despair, as this underestimated yet more authentic film is defiantly realistic, more conventional and plot-driven, exhibiting a spare, austere quality, where the simplicity and naturalistic tone sets this apart from most all other westerns you can think of, bringing to mind Peter Fonda’s largely unseen The Hired Hand (1971).  At the outset, a bumbling group of outlaws rob a passing stagecoach, yet Hellman slows the action down so the scenes play out in real-time, turning morbid when one of them takes a bullet, where there’s only two passengers and barely any money, hardly worth it you might think, but this botched robbery makes you realize not every heist pays off, which is the chance you take.  Simultaneously, three cowboys are seen riding home to Texas after the rodeo they were to perform in got canceled.  As they travel through a similar terrain, Wes (Jack Nicholson), Vern (Cameron Mitchell) and Otis (Tom Filer), stop to view the gruesome remains of a hanged man strung up to a tree, the kind of thing that makes you think twice about entering the territory, as it’s just such an ominous sign, like a Shakespearean witch’s prophecy.  They don’t react much, offering a few stoic comments, but these are not articulate men, outsiders most of their lives, never staying in any one place very long.  The sparse dialogue is actually taken from the frontier diaries and journalistic accounts of the time, like Andy Adams’ The Log of a Cowboy, a real-life account of his experiences on the trail, or A.S. Mercer’s The Banditti of the Plains (Asa Mercer and The Banditti of the Plains) and The Cattlemen's Invasion of Wyoming in 1892 (The Crowning Infamy of the Ages), a true account of the crimes against homesteaders by cattle barons, with a scathing exposé about Wyoming’s Johnson County War (The Johnson County War: 1892 Invasion of Northern ...), including the siege and burning of a ranch house to draw out the inhabitants who were shot on sight, read by Nicholson when he was writing the script, providing insights into the characters he was writing about, crafting a story of simple men caught up in the cruelties of the time, and an authentic reflection of the American West.  As fate would have it, the three cowhands mistakenly wander right into a remote cabin holing up the stage outlaws, sensing no trouble at first, just a place to bed down for the night, spending the night sleeping with the horses.  The cowboys are suspicious of the ragged crew, but the one-eyed leader, Blind Dick (Harry Dean Stanton), is hospitable enough, sharing food and corn whisky, but by morning they’re greeted with a hail of bullets, surrounded by a vigilante posse aiming to either shoot them or string them up to a tree, thinking they are all part of the stagecoach holdup gang, with Otis shot trying to make it to his horse.  Like Mercer’s historical exposé, the posse burns down the cabin, executing those inside, with Wes and Vern trying to make an escape on foot up a high ridge of a box-canyon that offers no real chance of getting away.    

There are overlaps in the two films, each a story of paranoia and pursuit, expressed through alienation and existentialism, with Hellman claiming all his films have been informed in some way by Samuel Beckett, asking fundamental existential questions like “Who are we?” and “Where are we going?”  While this is a dark and brooding, psychologically intense western, introducing both slow-motion and realistic violence, while also using a limited musical score that never overshadows what happens onscreen, it lacks the suffocating dread that elevates The Shooting, where all the characters are bigger than life, yet the stripped down, bare minimum aspect of this film is highly unusual, with minimal dialogue, which is a true standout, among the most economic scripts of the 1960’s.  Yet its brazen depiction of a roving posse bypassing the legal system by taking the power of the gun into their own hands reflects the current power unbalance that continues to haunt America’s racial crisis through perpetual police shootings on the streets of America today.  What it also captures that other westerns seem to omit is the pervasive sense of loneliness from such extreme isolation, essentially cut off from the rest of humanity.  The enveloped emptiness from traversing vast distances on horseback can only be described as incredibly monotonous, where the land poses such a physical challenge, as it’s even difficult to do today in a car with all the newfangled gadgetry, so imagine the difficulties encountered going on such long distance rides, wearing the same clothes, struggling to find water, eating the same basic meals of biscuits and beans, having little to talk about on those grueling days in the saddle under the hot sun.  Not anyone’s idea of a good time.  Hellman reimagines what the West was like from a personal perspective, working against tradition, so instead of focusing his attention on action sequences, he instead shows us what happens in between the bursts of gunfire and furious chases, offering the perspective of those being hunted down.  This alternative vision of the West is immediately apparent, where you need look no further than seeing Harry Dean Stanton step behind a rock and take a piss.  This is just not something you see in other westerns.  There are bookended scenes of a family homestead, where the ranch is run by an older man (George Mitchell) and his wife (Katherine Squire), along with their attractive 19-year-old daughter Abigail (Millie Perkins).  The posse visits them first, inspecting the house and barn for the escapees, and leave satisfied they’re not harboring criminals.  Shortly afterwards, however, Wes and Vern have commandeered the women inside while the old man continues to work outdoors, taking an axe to a giant tree stump.  But once he sets foot inside, he is disarmed as well, suddenly at the mercy of these supposed dangerous outlaws who attempt to explain their innocence, to no avail, as what is the family supposed to believe when they take their horses, viewing them as little more than common horse thieves.  The quietness and non-threatening manner of this home invasion, however, speaks volumes, attempting to be polite while at the same time exposing the desperateness of their situation, protagonists on the lam from a lynch mob, as that hanging posse has promised the settlers, “They’ve seen their last sunrise.”  In this film there are no heroes or villains, just victims of tragic circumstances that reveal the hardships of trying to settle the American West, where even for those who somehow manage to make it, there is a devastating cost associated with everyday survival, where there’s an underlying feeling of sorrow that saturates every frame of this film.    

Ride in the Whirlwind | Jack Nicholson  full movie, YouTube (1:22:06)