Interview: Léa Drucker – Last Summer (L’été dernier)

She was pulled from obscurity (or non-retirement since her last feature was 2013’s Abuse of Weakness) when Saïd Ben Saïd optioned the rights to 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts and then proposed it French filmmaker Catherine Breillat, and as luck would have it Léa Drucker would join a pantheon of memorable morally complex roles for actresses that we find in Breillat cinema. In Last Summer (L’été dernier), Drucker plays Anne, a lawyer who specializes in cases of sexual consent and parental custody while she is the matriarch of two adopted children and she then swims in murky waters in her relationship with teenage son (Théo) of her current husband. Immaturity, impunity and a strong family bound get mashed together in this unsettling look at new family dynamics. Sideshow & Janus Films will distribute the film. Read our review.

After showcasing Last Summer at NYFF, Léa Drucker joined Catherine Breillat at the 2023 Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montreal. I had the pleasure to speak with Léa about the challenging lead part, how she thought about performance during long-takes, the perks of working on scenes with a newcomer actor and her more recent collabs with Saïd Ben Saïd, Xavier Legrand and Lukas Dhont.