104 min | NR | June 28, 2024 | Sideshow / Janus Films
Anne defends abused teenagers for a living. Then her husband’s seventeen-year-old son moves in and she starts an affair with him. Catherine Breillat returns to ask how a woman talks herself into the thing she spends her days condemning.
Anne is a lawyer whose work involves protecting minors from the adults who exploit them. She lives a comfortable life with her husband Pierre and their two young adopted daughters. Pierre’s seventeen-year-old son Théo moves into the house. Anne begins an affair with him. Catherine Breillat’s film is not about the affair itself. It is about the machinery of self-justification that lets a woman cross the exact line she spends her days condemning.
Léa Drucker plays Anne with a controlled surface that keeps cracking. She is composed in the courtroom and composed at the dinner table. Drucker turns that composure into both a weapon and a tell. Samuel Kircher plays Théo with a slouching, unstable energy that reads as genuine adolescence and deliberate provocation at once. Olivier Rabourdin plays Pierre as a man so secure in his marriage that he never thinks to look. The film hands Drucker a late scene built entirely on denial, and she plays it without a flicker of shame.
Breillat directs her first feature in a decade and co-writes the script with Pascal Bonitzer. She adapts the Danish film Queen of Hearts and strips its melodrama into something cooler and more clinical. The camera holds in close on faces during the sex scenes and refuses to cut away from the aftermath. There is almost no musical score, so the silences carry the tension instead. The framing keeps Anne in tight, shallow focus, which traps her inside her own perspective and denies us any outside vantage.
This is a film about how power and language let people rationalize their worst choices. Anne never sees herself as a predator because predators are the people she defeats in court. Breillat refuses to punish her and refuses to absolve her. The final movement turns on a lie, and the film watches the lie do its work. It is a cold, exact study of a woman who knows what abuse looks like from the outside and cannot recognize it from within.