Last Summer & lazy spaghetti
What to watch and eat this weekend: Catherine Breillat, the brat collection, and more.
These screenshots from Catherine Breillat’s Perfect Love (1992) cheekily epitomize the worldview of French auteur, whose work has been, she tells me, trying to get to the root of our desires—and why we do the sometimes absolutely ludicrous things we do.
I had a great conversation with her for Vogue, on the occasion of her new movie Last Summer. She was ebullient and game to talk—but as can happen, some of her reflections didn’t make it into the final published piece. They’re too good not to share, so I’ve included these exclusive insightful scraps at the end of this newsletter.
If you can’t see the new movie yet, you should definitely watch Fat Girl, her most iconic and well-known one as a primer, though Breillat had some other suggestions on where to start, too.
Last night I went to the new “oyster disco” STRANGE DELIGHT, which was unexpectedly hit or miss. More details on that soon.
This weekend I beg you to watch young Al Pacino nervously waffle over where to wear his handkerchief in the imperfect CRUISING, part of Nitehawk’s Be Gay, Do Crime series.
You could also try to see one of Charlie XCX’s curated selection of party films at The Roxy, including TO DIE FOR, PARTY GIRL, and PROJECT X.
You’ll likely catch me watching artist Robert Indiana eating mushrooms in Andy Warhol’s EAT or Eduardo Williams’ THE HUMAN SURGE 3, which I missed during the fall festivals.
For the Fourth, you can’t do better than Altman’s NASHVILLE. But my independence day tradition is DePalma’s BLOW OUT. It actually unfolds during the fictional holiday Liberty Day in Philly, but it’s awash in red white and blue, and conspiracy. What’s more American than that…
For
I compiled a list of outdoor movies playing around town this summer.
TO WATCH
Over the last three decades, Catherine Breillat has clinically charted female sexuality and its intersections with power and intimacy. Last Summer (2023), a formidable return after Abuse of Weakness (2013) a decade ago, is marked at times by an uncanny tenderness and the golden nostalgia suggested by its title. Elegantly transcending its salacious premise—a middle-aged woman shtupping her husband’s 17-year-old son—the film offers a slippery study of desire and transgression, the line between which is both a permeable boundary and a treacherous descent.
A competent and successful attorney, Anne (Léa Drucker) leads a fairly comfortable, safe life with her husband, Pierre, and their utterly adorable adopted twin daughters. When Theo (Sam Kirchner), Pierre’s son from a previous marriage, arrives after being kicked out of school, she happily accommodates him in their suburban summer home, unfazed by the slender, floppy-haired thing who comes off as a hostile brat. It is only gradually, with the film’s patient unfurling, that Theo becomes a keenly inquisitive companion and eventually covert lover. During the passionate interludes, the camera glues itself to gazes and facial expressions rather than bodies, scrutinizing the underpinnings of desires rather than physical manifestations of it.
Last Summer hews quite closely to Queen of Hearts (2019), the Danish film on which it’s based, until it doesn't. Breillat preserves the dialogue and setup, but erodes and obscures the foundations of Anne’s psychology. The predatory undertones of the original, more palpably an erotic thriller, were abundantly clear, and by muting them Breillat also curbs moral impositions—her own and the audience’s. Last Summer ultimately unnerves and agitates the source material’s inherent provocations. Maintaining a facade of unwavering composure, Drucker renders Anne apparently vulnerable but her true feelings indecipherable. We’re left to parse her improper inclinations, and the undeniable manipulations that arise once the secret’s out, on our own. That Anne primarily advocates for victims of abuse at work is not lost on us. What is clear though are the self-deceptions and preservationist tactics the upper-middle classes will employ to save face and uphold domestic order. Steeped with trappings of bourgeois life, in another iteration Last Summer could easily have been fodder for Chabrol.
This review was originally published on Screen Slate.
TO EAT
The most chilling sequence occurs when Anne's husband having discovered his wife’s affair, returns home unexpectedly, his face a snarling mask. She hastily prepares dinner for him and their daughters, forced to sit through the meal while anticipating his reaction.
Here is where I wish i had a screenshot of when Anne says something to the effect of Oh this, I just whipped this up! The dinner is a facade, a farce of domestic tranquility preceding the impending argumentative storm. Both we and Anne wonder how the tense situation will unfold, uncertain of what to expect—and the scene does not play out as you might think.
Some lazy spaghetti recipes that you too can easily make and eat when you’ve been caught in a lie.
Ever so slightly more effort, Ina Garten’s iconic uncooked tomato pasta
Aglio e oglio saved my life and wallet during college and needs no recipe but if you need instructions here you are, c/o none other than Roy Choi
A necessary upgrade for your hot buttered noodles, particularly for those you won’t dare order off a kids’ menu
OUTTAKES
Talking some more with Catherine Breillat
When the characters speak, you have three possibilities. One is that they're telling the truth. The other is that they're lying to themselves. And in the third, they're lying to the other person. - Breillat on adapting Last Summer
In Last Summer, Theo is aware of his sexuality but not yet fully cognizant of its power. In a sense, it's almost a reversal of the dynamic in your other films, where it’s a a young adolescent woman who typically finds herself in that situation of sexual self-discovery.
Breillat: The situation is a bit Pasolinian, like Teorema (1968) As soon as Theo enters, he eroticizes everyone, beginning with his two younger stepsisters. There's something that feels slightly insidious in that scene even though they are innocent girls. To me, the filmmaking is all about these details. I see myself in the tradition of Proust, who was a maniac about the details. The more details you give, the more depth and richness and color you give to a character without the reader [or viewer] necessarily realizing it.
Each of the sex scenes is shot differently, but in the first we practically only see his face, and not Anne/Lea’s body. It had the effect of making everything unusually more erotic.
Breillat: Yes, absolutely! I found it amusing to be able to focus on that. But, the producers worried and said, “Well, you haven't shown them in the throes of love, in orgasm.” I told them, “Precisely. We have three other films in which we see and enjoy the breadth of sexual relationships.” Here I like the fact that we're showing this focusing on the young boy’s face. It's far more unusual to show that in cinema, something that we haven't seen before.
Also by filming in close up, the actors didn't have to be naked. They were covered up as much as possible. Nonetheless, you're asking them to be emotionally nude on camera. They're expressing ecstasy, transcendence, and that leaves the audience absolutely speechless.
The film has four love sex scenes in it, a huge amount for any film, and I shot without an intimacy coordinator. I would never bring one on set. They aren't filmmakers. The problem for me is this blindness. There is so much subtlety in human existence. As an example of that, I'll take the French president Emmanuel Macron. He is in a relationship with this woman who was in a position of authority over him when they first met because she was his teacher when he was 15 years old. Despite that, they're still together and no one would suggest that she was wielding or abusing any power that she might have had over him.
The film’s ending is intentionally ambiguous so people can find their own meaning. But on the other hand, have noticed in other people unexpected reactions that would seem contrary to what you wanted them to take away from it.
Breillat: There was one reaction by French writer Christine Angot who detailed about her experience of having been abused by her father in an incestuous relationship. I found her reaction to my film extraordinarily distressing. She said that the spectator in the film was left in the quagmire, that it was impossible to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, and that of course isn't the case. A film of cinema art shouldn't be about showing what's right and wrong. If you have to do that, then it's not art, it's moralizing.
I am wondering if you’re into cars. There's a Mercedes convertible in this film, and vintage cars tend to crop up in a lot of your movies.
Breillat: I'm a huge fan of cars and especially convertibles. They’re also very easy to shoot in them! The little girls were absolutely thrilled to be in that scene in Last Summer.
Can you tell me about how Kim Gordon got involved with the film? Did you give her any direction as to what the music would sound like?
Breillat: It was a wonderful collaboration. I wanted a lot of bass in the film, bass that we wouldn't hear through our ears, but that we would feel in our stomachs. She didn’t understand my instruction, but came up with a “Tripping,” which was perfect. It’s absolutely antithetical to film music because it involves voices and usually in film music you don't have that.
This was also the first time that she'd done a soundtrack before but artists recognize each other, discover each other through their works, and you create this family of fellow artists. It turns out that Kim Gordon's current group is called Body/Head, and that's a reference to the scene in 36 Fillette where they talk about cutting a woman in two. Kim was also on a show where she was asked what would be the work of art, the book that she would take with her on a desert island, and she cited a book about me by Douglas Keesey, from the Manchester University Press.
I was reading an interview where you described experimenting with a gaze of shame in A Real Young Girl (1976), your first feature, which is interesting because that's kind of the opposite of we get in Last Summer. Over your lifetime, characters started out young and they've aged kind of along with you in some respects. I'm wondering how you have found your films have changed over the years. And, if you find that making all these films, your relationship to sex and desire has changed as you’ve gotten older.
Breillat: My vision, my experience hasn't changed, but by constantly turning to human experience, the explorations have gone deeper and deeper. I think that the vision that I transmit has gotten deeper as well.
If my films are a desire and desire is a fiction, it's a story that you tell yourself without admitting it. I'm fascinated by the fact—that we can be fully dressed talking to someone and then in an instant we're undressed, even though we’d never anticipated it. We're doing things that, just a few seconds before, would never have thought to do. It's totally a fantasy.
I'm concerned about the moralizing that we do now, the fact that we forbid ourselves so many things, that we put so many limits on our experience. If there's a future to humanity, then it rests on our desire, and we have to embrace them.
Your films are playing at an upcoming New York at a retrospective.* If someone was coming to watch your films for the first time, what would you recommend they start?
Breillat: Of course there’s Fat Girl, which is what most people agree upon as the starting point, but the recently reception to A Real Young Girl surprised me. The Spanish audiences had stopped watching my film after Romance (1999), which they they found too provocative and unnerving. Yet the cinemas were full, and here they were at this retrospective of mine, watching the film that to me is a hundred times more shocking. I even warned them before watching it, [A Real Young Girl] that they'd want to leave the cinema. But the response was extraordinary. Afterwards, all the women in the cinema, whether they were my age, 40- or even 22-year olds, they would will come up and say, “Thank you. This is me. You've presented me on screen. This is how I feel.” I've been ultra-feminist since I was a little girl without even knowing it.
The film that represents perhaps the most philosophical introduction to my work is Anatomy of Hell (1988) but it’s the hardest one to watch because it’s not a work of fiction but of philosophy. In French, the word sex refers to gender, but it also refers to the genitals. The first thing that happens when you get off the plane is that you have to fill out a form, and the first question on that form is, state your sex. To me it's incomprehensible that you'd be forced to identify yourself with your sex, that is to say, with your genitals. This is what Anatomy of Hell is about. I wanted to force myself to look at the physical sex, because for me it was unbearable, something that I couldn't stand to look at—none of us can. None of us wants to be identified with the physical.
In Romance, there is a scene where Marie goes to the gynecologist who explains that in Chinese medicine, women don’t expose themselves but point to an ivory sculpture to indicate where they feel pain. This scene shows how the image can expose you. The image represents you, just as much as flesh does— and that is what we find so disturbing, what makes looking at flesh so difficult. It's a violence that I impose on myself. I’d rather look away. Personally, I’m puritanical, but at the same time I hate this puritanism and won't accept it. But you can't escape your upbringing or who you are.
Lastly I want to quote two definitions of art that I’ve referred to before. First, the reason art is so important is because it’s useless. It serves nothing. It has no point. That which is useful is trivial, and that which is, inessential, that which has no point is transcendent. The other definition, which is far more political, is that art answers the questions that we studiously avoid asking.
*The retro at lincoln center just ended, but a handful of friends have newly been restored and hopefully will be released in the coming months.