“Girls are grosser than men, believe me.” Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer is a master stroke. Eviscerates how bourgeois liberalism litigates sexual transgressions by tackling the sticky subject of woman as predator. Top 5 movie of the year, will be chewing on its implications for days and weeks to come.

Anne (Léa Drucker) seemingly takes no real pleasure in anything she does. Her verboten tryst emerges like an aberration out of boredom rather than a stab at liberation from real or imagined trappings. Even the way she approaches sex is distanced, cold. She relays a story about her first elder crush on a 33 year-old man as a corpse while her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) penetrates her. With Theó (Samuel Kirchet), Anne is either not within the camera’s frame or her face is tilted up and away from him, with her eyes closed. 

Anne’s desires are practically inscrutable. Besides a torn denial and embrace of Theó, Anne never expresses what precisely it is she wants. Does she want her husband? Theó? Both? Neither? Or is her appetite an insatiable consequence of capitalism, a force only interested in devouring all which lays in her path? Anne exemplifies how feminism has become about equal opportunity for grotesque behavior. 

You can be a woman attorney advocating for adolescents, including victims of rape, while simultaneously creating new victims within the walls of your isolated suburban compound. You can be a sexual predator, cheat, lie, have your husband and your adolescent paramour/victim, have the dream job. You can even settle the assault case behind the scenes so no one in your life is ever the wiser. The 21st century woman can truly have it all.

Catherine Breillat has always been a provocative filmmaker and it’s an absolute delight that her decade hiatus did nothing to diminish her feral bite.