EOY #4: Last Summer (Catherine Breillat, 2023), Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023)
Last Summer (Catherine Breillat, 2023), Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023)
Last Summer (Catherine Breillat, 2023):
Catherine Breillat’s first film in over a decade, Last Summer, returns to the familiar ground of dissecting the provocative, inscrutable dimensions of female desire. With Fat Girl, perhaps her most well-known film, she played with the naturalism of the Rohmerian drama, centering the film on two young sisters and taking Claire’s Knee’s depiction of patriarchal delusion to a violent, ambiguously satirical extreme. Last Summer is a subversive take on a different kind of French drama, the bourgeois summer film, one that asks the audience to grapple with a quasi-incestuous case of pedophilia when Anne, a lawyer who advocates for young victims of sexual assault, begins an affair with her 17 year old stepson Pierre.
Breillat’s treatment of the material presents the intellectual and the primal in violent conflict. Anne’s relationship with Pierre invites viewers to speculate why Anne would commit such a moral transgression. Prolonging her her sex scenes to an uncomfortable degree, and shooting them in tight close-ups, Breillat practically dares viewers to read the act as metaphor. Is her tryst a jump from her staid upper-class lifestyle (a reading supported by Pierre’s position as a Teorema-type figure)? Is it a twisted mutation of her loneliness? Does it assuage her fear of aging? Breillat, who has always been a fantastic screenwriter, floats all of these interpretations within an airy French naturalism so that when the film’s tone shifts to a colder, jagged sensibility, the primal realities of the abuse are contrasted for maximum effect. Faced with the possibility of losing everything, Anne vindictively abuses her institutional power, her latent cruelty (note the subtle favoritism in her treatment of her adopted daughters) finally unleashed. Léa Drucker’s animalistic performance is staggering in its ferocity. The physicality of her performance presents Anne’s body as trapped between two equally reprehensible poles, neither of which grant her the pleasure she desires.
Last Summer is distributed by Janus/Sideshow and is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023):
Even for Lisandro Alonso’s standards, Eureka, his first film in nearly a decade, is strange. It’s recognizably a narrative film, and the thematics are unusually legible, but Eureka retains the equally frustrating and admirable inertia that typifies Alonso’s work. Eureka is a film about Native American representation. Consisting of three interlocking pastiches, the film interrogates the way cinematic, contemporary, and historic myth making have become an oppressive feedback loop for Native self-identification. In the first, Viggo Mortensen stars in a satirical spin on the classic western. The film’s lengthy middle section is a prestige-TV reminiscent police procedural set on a reservation in South Dakota. The last, a staged Brazilian myth, borrows equally from Apichatpong as it does from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Characters recur and rhymes form, but perhaps the simplest metaphor in the film is the shifting aspect ratio, which emphasizes the omnipresence of the frame.
The strongest section, and the one that clarifies the film’s disparate threads is the contemporary middle section. Here, Alonso follows two sisters over a night on the reservation. The older sister, Alaina (Alaina Clifford) is an officer, who spends the night taking dispatches, taking in the sad sights of drug dens, drunk drivers, and run-down casinos. While Alaina seems to be in the process of succumbing to the hopelessness of the reservation, Sadie (Sadie Lapontie), the younger sister, has made the decision to leave. She spends the night playing basketball and visiting a friend in jail, talking about how she’s going on a trip (“it’s this reservation”, she says). Along the way, the sisters encounter Maya (Chiara Mastroianni). Mastroianni played a bar owner in the film’s opening segment, and here, she’s a French actress researching for a future role in a Western. “Are you an actor, or a reporter here to give us bad press?” Sadie asks, gesturing towards the fluidity of representation, reality, and temporality. Each of Eureka’s disparate styles then, becomes a stand-in for painful colonial scars. Placing the narratives in a continuum (a nod to fellow Argentinian director Eduardo William’s The Human Surge), Alonso charges the reservation with the trauma of American colonialism and the psychic harm of the classic Western dreamscape.
While most other directors opt for transcendence, Alonso goes for dissatisfaction. He instills inescapability through structure and (lack of) narrative instead of atmospherics. When Sadie finally embarks on her trip in a remarkable leap towards surrealism (a moment so magical that I didn’t realize it could also be taken as one of the reservation’s oft-mentioned suicides), her landing in the film’s Brazilian set segment eventually reveals itself as just another representational prison. I’m convinced this hour long story is meant to feel purgatorial, an intentionally interminable piece of cinema that gives audiences the feelings of being trapped without the catharsis of a Bonello scream or the meditative intensity of a Tsai Ming-Liang long take. In a way it’s the film’s most radical gambit, a move as admirable as it is frustrating.
Eureka is distributed by Film Movement and is available on VOD.