Katherine Brailey, ‘Last Summer’ director: ‘I’ve never been able to grow up, I’m so bored’

It’s been ten years since we last heard from him. Misguided filmmaker Catherine Breillat hasn’t lost her rage, her impetuosity, her insatiable appetite for the truth. He returns last summerHis latest feature film, produced by Said Ben Said, is a novel of poisonous passion under the curious light of the midday sun.

Your latest film is about an incestuous relationship between a middle-aged woman and her son. But we understand that the topic is elsewhere…

It’s more complicated, it’s about vertigo. Anna’s character, played by Lea Drucker, talks about this at one point: vertigo is not the fear of falling, but the temptation to fall. When we prefer to live in fear than to fall. This is how I solve many of my problems. I used to be very afraid of flying; The day I decided I was already dead before I received it, he healed me. It looks like weakness [Catherine Breillat est hémiplégique depuis un accident vasculaire cérébral survenu en 2005]. It is very uncomfortable to be disabled and to see people think of a toad as old and ugly. The solution is to get ahead of them: to see yourself as a waste. So we do worse than humans. And we deserve the right to be indifferent.

What was the basis of your film, this adaptation of the Danish film “Queen of Hearts” (Droningen, 2019), Mai El-Tuch?

I didn’t change the Danish script much, there are almost identical scenes and articulations, except that they don’t say the same thing at all. The Danish film was of the first quality. I added a dimension of denial: my characters lie to themselves. Must reread Musset or even Idiotby Dostoyevsky. When you’re in love, you’re constantly lying to yourself and doing disastrous things.

What was it like to return to your previous film, Abuse of Weakness, ten years later?

it sceard me very much. I believe that every new film should be approached as the first film. We never know what we are going to do because the film is made with the flesh of the actors. It’s not like paint, we have no control over it. Our raw material is people, and this is absolutely immoral, because we use them as tools, turn them into fantasies, extract emotions from them. I’m not as interested in bodies, at least not as much as faces. Bare face is terribly intimate, nothing is more shy.