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When the French director Catherine Breillat was 40, her then-husband and the father of her first child ended their relationship to be with a much younger woman. Soon after, Breillat started dating a man 12 years her junior.<\/p>\n
\u201cMen want to repudiate their wives of a certain age by saying they couldn\u2019t be loved by anyone anymore,\u201d Breillat said in a recent video interview via an interpreter. \u201cBut for me that\u2019s not true. I want to tell other women there\u2019s no cause for despair.\u201d In \u201cLast Summer,\u201d which comes to theaters Friday, she probes at this realization through an incendiary premise.<\/p>\n
Since the 1970s, the lauded director, now 75, has repeatedly focused her unflinching gaze on the troubled sexual awakenings of girls, often in the uncaring hands of older men, but in \u201cLast Summer,\u201d that dynamic is inverted: A middled-aged lawyer, Anne (L\u00e9a Drucker), risks her career and marriage by having a clandestine affair with her 17-year-old stepson, Th\u00e9o (Samuel Kircher).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The film, Breillat\u2019s first in a decade, joins several recent movies concerned with the power dynamics of heterosexual couples in which the woman is older, including the lighter Anne Hathaway-vehicle \u201cThe Idea of You<\/a>\u201d and Todd Haynes\u2019s divisive \u201cMay December<\/a>.\u201d (Haynes\u2019s movie was inspired by the true story<\/a> of a teacher who started a relationship with one of her students.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n According to Breillat, this wave of films reflects a simple reality. \u201cIt\u2019s the truth,\u201d she said: \u201cYoung people are attracted to older women.\u201d<\/p>\n While \u201cMay December\u201d positions the young man as a victim grappling with conflicted feelings, Breillat instead made the teen in her movie \u201cnot only the object of desire, but the subject of desire,\u201d she said, and the one who \u201cpresses for this affair to take place.\u201d Breillat refuses to pass judgment on either of her characters, and instead chronicles how the illicit desire consumes them both.<\/p>\n \u201cI find such a portrait far more interesting than the moralizing society loves to engage in,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Part of Breillat\u2019s motivation in making \u201cLast Summer\u201d \u2014 which is a reimagining of another film, the 2019 Danish drama \u201cQueen of Hearts<\/a>\u201d \u2014 was to interrogate the idea of the \u201ccougar\u201d (a term she hates) and the social norms that suggest \u201cif it\u2019s a woman who is seen with a younger man, you assume he is only with her for financial reasons,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In her nearly five-decade career, which includes acting in the scandalous Bernardo Bertolucci film \u201cLast Tango in Paris,\u201d female sexuality has been the primary concern of Breillat\u2019s work.<\/p>\n