In the first scene of Last Summer, 76 year old Catherine Breillat assures everyone that she hasn’t lost her edge or voice in the decade since her last film Abuse of Weakness, or by remaking an existing film (2019’s Danish film Queen of Hearts) for the first time in her career. Our lead, lawyer Anne (Léa Drucker), interrogates one of her clients, a teen accusing an older man of rape, about the details of the assault; the kind of thing that fits perfectly within Breillat’s abrasive, morally complex, and fascinating filmography.

The interrogation itself isn’t what’s fascinating, it’s that Last Summer is about a lawyer specializing in cases involving minors and sexual misconduct beginning a sexual relationship with her seventeen year old stepson. And while some of the complications of the film are direct holdovers from Queen of Hearts, Breillat changes enough to make Last Summer wholly her own, turning a character study of an unrepentant predator into something much more prickly.

Far from anything resembling anyone getting their groove back or wish fulfillment for a porn-watching teen, Last Summer plays out like a high stakes power struggle from the start; and not only between Anne and her stepson Theo (Samuel Kircher).

Anne’s husband and Theo’s father Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) is financially and professionally emasculated at the start of the film when his prominent position comes under reassessment because of some suspicious money moving. He pities himself and wonders if Anne thinks he’s “an old jerk,” because that’s what Theo thinks of him, before reasserting himself by having sex with Anne in one of the film’s best scenes.

In a single take, as Pierre slowly humps and she either closes her eyes or looks off into the distance, Anne tells a story of falling in love with an older man when she was fourteen, but also finding herself disgusted by his baggy skin, revealing at the end that this senior citizen was a whopping 33 years old at the time. She of course assures Pierre that she loves his body, “a body that’s lived,” but the anxieties about age have set in. Theo’s often brutal coldness to Pierre also hurts him and makes Pierre doubt himself as more than just a father.

Theo’s coldness extends to Anne initially too. Until Theo joins her and the twins she and Pierre adopted on a swimming trip where he playfully pushes her under, and, frustrated by this, she holds him under until he struggles, then keeps holding just a bit longer. Soon after, Theo’s pressuring her to let him tattoo her, a literally penetrative activity he promises “is addictive” and will have her “begging for another.” It’s not long before he makes a move and they’re sleeping together. Without revealing more, the film continues to twist from here culminating in an incredible ending with an almost painfully slow fade to black.

Throughout, all three leads ensure that the film’s constantly writhing script and Breillat’s unflinching filmmaking never falter or register as either too on the nose thematically or purely provocative. Kircher and Drucker in particular are phenomenal, alternating between using every muscle in their faces to convey an impossible mix of emotions and somehow revealing just as much with a blank stare.

Last Summer fires on all cylinders and is another wonderfully uncomfortable film from one of our greatest working filmmakers. Here’s hoping she makes another soon instead of waiting another decade.