Catherine Breillat’s ‘Last Summer’ Will Live Stream on Criterion Channel This November

Exclusive: After the live-streaming event, the French director's provocative incest drama will then be added to the platform's library on December 1.

Catherine Breillat‘s psychosexual reckless return to form is here. Her acclaimed latest film, “Last Summer” (Sideshow/Janus), will premiere on the Criterion Channel on November 21 with a live-streaming event, as IndieWire announces exclusively. The “Last Summer” live-stream, happening that evening at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET, is in line with Criterion’s new tradition of launching the Sideshow/Janus titles early — the streamer similarly launched Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast” that way over the summer.

“Last Summer” also joins the Criterion Channel as a retrospective of provocative filmmaker Breillat’s oeuvre streams on the platform, including “Fat Girl” and “Anatomy of Hell” and “Sex Is Comedy.” Starring Léa Drucker in one of the year’s best performances, “Last Summer” earned raves earlier this year and at Cannes and other festivals in 2023. The streaming premiere is good cause to remember “Last Summer” for your year-end lists. Bonus features accompanying the live-stream event will include a new interview with Breillat.

As we wrote earlier this year, “Last Summer” stars “Drucker as a child sex crimes attorney falling freely into an affair with her 17-year-old stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher). Anne (Drucker) cuts a bourgeois figure, idling the summer away at her family’s holiday getaway outside Paris, but that’s all toppled when the very transgressions she seeks justice for in the workday become her personal undoing at home. There’s a fantastic late scene when Anne is confronted by her husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), who’s now tuned into the deceit and sexual abuse going on. Breillat holds on Drucker’s face as Anne silently cascades from near-panic to grimly confident resolution as she starts to foist on Pierre the rhetoric she uses to defend abused young women as a lawyer, contorting that language to her benefit and making herself the victim of a conspiracy. And the way Breillat fixes the camera on Drucker in an earlier moment of sexual ecstasy, when reframed in the later context, showcases Drucker’s tremendous range and gift for playing a woman for whom the ground is coming out beneath her.”

As Breillat told IndieWire in an interview earlier this year, “I can only invent these things at night and in a state of terror. For me, cinema is really Icarus’ flight. It’s being at the edge of the abyss, having to take a step forward to fly. It’s only when I’m faced with this abyss that I can have the inspiration to create scenes that are going to have the emotion and the grace that I need for them.”

Look out for the Criterion Channel live stream of “Last Summer” on November 21 before the movie joins Criterion’s streaming library December 1.