A girl sleeping soundly with her stepson? This director knows this could cause injury.

When French director Catherine Brillette was 40, her then-husband and father of her first child broke up with a much younger woman. Shortly thereafter, Breillat began a relationship with a man 12 years her junior.

“Men want to reject their wives of a certain age, saying that no one can love them anymore,” Breillat said in a contemporary video interview through an interpreter. “But that’s not true for me. I want to tell other women that there is no reason to despair. In “Last Summer,” which hits theaters Friday, she examines this realization through a provocative premise.

Since the 1970s, the acclaimed director, now 75, has time and again focused his unflinching gaze on women’s suffering sexual awakening, often at the careless hands of used men, but in “Last In “Summer”, this dynamic is reversed: A middle-aged lawyer, Anne (Leia Drucker), jeopardizes her career and marriage by carrying on a secret affair with her 17-year-old stepson, Theo (Samuel Kircher).

Breillat’s first film in a decade, joins a number of contemporary films considering the power dynamics of straight couples using a woman, including the lighter Anne Hathaway-vehicle “The Idea of ​​You” and Todd Haynes’ Contains the divisive “may”. December.” (Haynes’ film was inspired by the real story of an instructor who began dating one of his students.)

According to Breillat, this influx of flicks reflects a simple truth. “It’s true,” she said: “Younger people are attracted to older women.”

While “May December” presents the young boy as a victim struggling with conflicting emotions, Brillat makes the teen in his film “not just an object of desire, but a subject of desire,” he said, and he One who “presses for this matter to happen.” Brillat refused to pass any judgment on both of his characters, instead describing how illicit desire consumes them both.

He said, “I find such a picture much more interesting than that of a puritanical society.”

Part of Brillette’s inspiration in creating “Last Summer” — which is a reimagining of another film, the 2019 Danish drama “Queen of Hearts” — was to question the concept of “cougar” (a term she hates) and Social norms that recommend that “if a woman is seen with a younger man, you assume she’s only with him for financial reasons,” he said.

Throughout her nearly five-decade career, which includes starring in Bernardo Bertolucci’s infamous film “Last Tango in Paris,” female sexuality has been the central preoccupation of Brillette’s work.

Manohla Dargis, in her insightful overview of “Last Summer,” writes, “Very few directors produce work with the same depth as Brillat, a longtime, reliably interesting provocateur who changes the way the world thinks about what women do. “Tests the limits of what should be done, what should be said and what should be.”

On the other hand, Breillat’s fearless exploration of desire onscreen has sometimes met with criticism in France, where she has barely been recognized. Had it not been for the certain reception for his paintings in English-speaking countries, Brillet said he believed his profession might have been non-existent in his home country.

When he forgave the 1988 piece “36 Fillets”, in which a 40s playboy seduces a 14-year-old girl for sex, French critics, Brillet recalled, said it was “so far The worst French film of all time. ,

He said, “I was criticized for having a male protagonist who was ‘caricatured’.” “And of course, the #MeToo movement has shown that I never invent anything in my cinema, what I portray is reality.”

Even though she is known for sometimes candid moments of intimacy in her paintings, Brillette said she did not remember “Last Summer” as a story in which physical leisure was the point of attraction. He said, “This film is about the dark side of desire.”

Nonetheless, “Last Summer” features three intercourse scenes between Anne and Theo, each at a certain stage of their destructive contact. On the other hand, her nudity remains deliberately offscreen. “You don’t need to shoot at their bodies,” Breillet said. “The exquisite emotions they are going through are just visible on their faces.”

Focusing on her steamy scenes, Brillette said she was wondering what the characters thought was attractive in a sexual role. What are they imagining?

“Love is about telling yourself stories; It’s about presenting yourself in a relationship,” she said. “So, it is a fantasy. It’s about the idea. It’s about ideas.”

Brillat said he is strongly against the use of intimacy coordinators, whose job, he said, was more to “pull a blindfold over the audience” than to ensure the emotional safety of the actors. In his view, that’s what a director is for. He said, “If a director is not capable of staging such a scene, he should not do it.”

Breillat said, there is always a fear when filming sex scenes, because they require complete sensitivity. For French provocation, that would be the way to go.

“If you’re not going to be scared, what’s the point of making movies, if the stakes aren’t so important that they’re at the heart of our existence?” He mentioned.