“I did something wrong to go to this woman”: I will tell you all about the incestuous and scandalous romance of last summer, Cannes 2023.

A few hours before the long-awaited Cannes awards, we wanted to talk to you about the film presented in competition this year, which is also expected due to its sulphurous theme, carried by an author and director whose taste is known, frontal and free. .

After staging the story of a 14-year-old girl seduced by a forty-year-old with 36 fillets, reducing the difference between cinema and pornography in romance, or condemning the uncomfortable manipulation of weakness, Catherine Braille returns to the cinema. A little bit of all this last summer, a remake of Queen of Hearts, a little-known Danish film by Mai El-Touch, which was offered to him by Said Ben Said, notably the producer of Paul Verhoeven’s other sultry Ellie. . A film that fits him and his obsessions like a glove.

Here again, female sexuality is explored, discussed, filmed according to the famous “female gaze”, which deconstructs filmic prejudices and questions them by offering another way of seeing, centered on the female gaze, rather than exclusively and traditionally. Masculine: Specifically in the first love scene, Breillat’s camera is fixed on his protagonist’s face, suggesting what he sees and feels as the subject of the act of love and no longer the object of desire.

The object of desire here is this 17-year-old (the moving Samuel Kircher) who is definitely young, but also attractive and so disturbing.

“I was disturbed by this character that no one has paid attention to before”He explained to the journalists present at the press conference of the film. “Suddenly he’s given a hand, for the first time he’s considered an adult. He’s important to someone. And it’s upsetting for him. Real violence for him.”

The irremediable temptation to fall

A lawyer specializing in sexual abuse of minors (note the irony and provocation here), the character portrayed by the sensual Leah Drucker is a fifty-something in charge who suddenly overcomes the attraction and desire that awakens in him a young boy; To the point of prompting him to jeopardize (subconsciously sabotage?) his perfectly ordered family life and career. The famous “unstoppable temptation to fall…”, which he later resolutely refuses, putting himself in “survival mode” at all costs, as told.

The attraction, the direct acting, the idyll that lasts until it is no longer possible, the complex consequences of this necessary but cruel break: love with Catherine Breila is not romantic, always shot with a kind of harshness, relentlessness.

Sex scenes are dry, no less embarrassing. As here the desire and female determination, sensual, then suddenly cruel, when it comes to denying everything and freeing oneself from responsibility, in the scene of the lie played by a forty-year-old girl for her husband, an anthology scene. Since then, a thunderstorm turns into a storm in the middle of a seemingly very calm summer.

“Teen is my passion”Ekaterine Breillat explained to the audience of journalists. “My heroine here is a mysterious woman, less predatory than in the original film, with a wider cast.” A heroine who, he says, is “neither manipulative nor predatory, not waiting to see what happens,” and whose mysterious face and eyes he scrutinizes until they close in full orgasm.

I myself did something wrong to go to this woman…

This mysterious, complex, unpredictable and very sexy woman, Leah Drucker approached him with the necessary fear: “I used a lot of things that I would have been afraid of doing a character like that, going for an image that I didn’t understand rationally. It was a dive, trying to stay as an actor, like a leaf that floats. On the water and get information.

I have to agree with you about discovering things while filming. I looked for the key to identify him without judging him. I knew that by working with Catherine, I would be inspired by her view of the world, which is unique. I myself did something wrong to go to this woman.”

A crime that the director recorded as close as possible to his actors, whom he photographed from close-up in tender youth or eloquent wrinkles, which fascinated and inspired him at the time. “The love part was almost improvised during filming. That kind of love affair was found in the frame. I need a frame to discover my actors. The film is thus created in the moment it is created.”

The film that divided the Croisette and which you will see in cinemas on September 20, 2023.