Jodie Foster was in pain. A collapsed disc in her back needed surgery. A hip replacement would follow.
But it was her 63rd birthday (Nov. 19), and she was in Paris. Dressed in a slim dark gray jacket and matching trousers, her hair coifed and makeup set, the two-time Oscar winner was poised for a marathon of interviews to promote the French release of her film “A Private Life” (opening in American theaters Jan. 16).
She began the day with an interview and a midmorning nosh at the chef Guy Savoy’s gastronomic paradise. Her meal: poached eggs under a hill of shaved Italian white truffles and oyster tartare with a granita of lemon and seaweed.
“Wow, this is so cool,” she said. “I took two Advils, so I’m gonna be OK. Isn’t this heaven?”
A photo shoot along the Seine followed. Foster grinned and posed even when a cold drizzle morphed into a downpour. Only when plump hailstones rained down was the shoot called off. “I have a mind over matter thing, ” she said. “It’s my job.”
Foster has made dozens of films over the decades, both as an actress and a director. Three of them have been French. But “A Private Life” (the French title: “Vie privée”) is the first in which she delivers a solo lead performance in French. And she speaks not just any French — but fluid, fast-moving, just about accent-less French.
She plays Lilian Steiner, an American psychoanalyst whose tightly controlled life in Paris unravels after her patient of nine years (Virginie Efira) dies suddenly, apparently by suicide. Convinced she was murdered, Lilian begins an obsessive private investigation. Her ex-husband, Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil) agrees to help. Along the way she consults a hypnotist and enters a hallucinatory dream state in which she and her patient were lovers in a previous life, playing in the string section of a Paris orchestra during the Nazi occupation.
The film, billed as a comic-tragic whodunit and directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, received an enthusiastic ovation at Cannes last May but opened to mixed reviews in France. Some critics faulted the plot as unrealistic and hard to follow but gushed over the performances, particularly the disarming chemistry between Foster and Auteuil.
Foster’s French connection started as a child, thanks to her France-obsessed stage mother, who was raising four children on her own. Foster, who began her career in a Coppertone commercial when she was 3, largely supported the family.
“My mom was completely in love with France,” said Foster. “She read books on Napoleon, drove a Peugeot, bought a French armoire and a French tapestry and French art works. Finally she went on a bus tour in France with a guide and a bus full of people, and she came back and said, ‘OK, that’s it. You’re gonna learn French. We’re gonna leave this country and you’re gonna be a French actor.”
Her mother brought her to Paris for the first time when she was 8. She remembers binge eating buttered baguettes filled with ham and taking photos of the Eiffel Tower and the bridges over the Seine. Her mother bought her a mini-Burberry coat and a French sailor suit and tam.
“I was Jodie in Paris,” she said.
Foster already had an exceptional connection to language. She started talking when she was 9 months old and could read billboards aloud in Spanish when she was 3 (the family’s housekeeper spoke Spanish). At 8 years old, she was able to correctly pronounce the name of the street of their hotel when her mother, who never learned French, could not.
Back in Los Angeles, Foster was enrolled in a French lycée, where she mastered French grammar and vocabulary and perfected her French accent.
“French school is hard,” she said. “There is recitation where they put you up against the wall and then they say like, ‘Recite this poem.’ I did science, I did math, history, everything in French. And every kid in my class was French except me.”
Unadorned and freckle-faced at 13, she appeared for the first time at Cannes in 1976 with “Taxi Driver,” in which she played a child prostitute. At the movie’s news conference, seated with her fellow actor Robert De Niro and her director, Martin Scorsese, Foster wowed journalists with her fluent French.
Afterward, her mother took her out of school and moved her to Paris to appear in a French film “Moi, Fleur Bleue.” She played a young teenager who, determined to lose her virginity, has sex with a much older man.
“That’s like the worst movie,” said Foster. “Terrible.”
They stayed in Paris for almost a year, buying an apartment (which Foster sold about 14 years ago) on the Île Saint-Louis. “Yeah, I didn’t go to school the whole time, so I missed geometry. How about that?”
To prepare for the role of Liliane Steiner, Foster read French books aloud at home and then turned up in Paris to immerse herself in French life, visiting bookstores, riding the Métro and the bus, working out at a gym, meeting with French psychoanalysts, taking cello lessons, dining in small bistros.
Her older sister Lucinda has lived in Paris for more than 40 years, and Foster spent time with her grandniece and even took her grandnephew to his karate classes. “I ate cheese, had aperitifs,” she said. “I didn’t talk to any Americans in Paris for three weeks. Sometimes when I had to speak French all day, I could barely move my jaw by the end of the day.”
She appreciates that French life truly respects privacy. Back home in the United States she is used to being more guarded. She says little publicly about her family, although Charlie, one of her two adult sons, is now in the public eye as an actor, and Foster’s wife, Alexandra Hedison, is an artist and photographer.
“Thankfully, the French leave you alone,” she said. “There is a kind of anonymity that I am able to have in everyday life. Isn’t it amazing when you can go in the Métro or on the bus, and somebody will be six inches from you and they don’t look at you, don’t talk to you. If you were in an elevator in America, within 10 seconds, an American will tell you where they work, who they’re married to, how much money they make.”
Zlotowski, the director, had long tried to woo Foster to star in a film before succeeding with this one. “She has this amazingly weird connection to the language,” said Zlotowski. “I had in a way Jodie in my bones — she is like one of a kind, a badass hero, solitary character.”
Because Foster’s French was so perfect, Zlotowski had her curse in English whenever she was angry to help remind viewers that she was American.
Foster entranced her French co-stars — with her French, bien sûr, but also with her bonhomie. “Ah là là — Jodie Foster — you are meeting a legend,” said Mathieu Amalric, the award-winning actor and filmmaker who plays the husband of the deceased patient. “I was scared to meet her. And then in 30 seconds she’s a human being and not a legend anymore.”
Noam Morgensztern, who plays an angry patient in the movie (and is a classically trained actor with Comédie Française, the country’s elite national theater), said, “She’s a perfectionist. Ultraprecise. I adored that! And her French is so incredible I sometimes forgot that she wasn’t French.”
Efira called her an “actress who is not caught up in her own myth — she’s not Catherine Deneuve.”
Foster developed an exceptionally close bond both on and off screen with Auteuil. Between takes, the two sat in folding chairs and talked about their lives. “The meeting between us was so natural, as if we’d known each other forever,” he said in an interview conducted in French. “I have the misfortune of not speaking English properly, so every time I’ve met American or English actors I admired, I’ve never been able to have a deep conversation. The fact that Jodie speaks perfect French, I was able to overcome that wall.”
One of the film’s key moments is when Lilian arrives unannounced at the medical office of her ex-husband, an ophthalmologist. Her tears will not stop flowing. He tells her he has never seen her cry. She replies, “I’m not crying. It’s my eyes.”
Coincidentally, that same line was uttered to touching effect by Auteuil in the 1986 film “Jean de Florette.” His performance as the ugly, hapless Ugolin won awards and made him famous.
“I was happy that Jodie reinvented the moment,” he said.
Foster resisted at first when Zlotowski requested that she improvise in the film. “I told Rebecca, ‘Look, I don’t know that I’m gonna be able to improvise in French. I’m gonna panic.’”
But the connection with Auteuil was so strong that they were carried away into improvising their last scene, a moment of tenderness together at a restaurant.
“There was such an atmosphere of complicity, freedom, and lightness and trust,” Auteuil said. “We were like two trapeze artists. We threw ourselves into the air, caught each other with our arms, and kept catching each other.”
Foster called this film a “trial balloon,” with perhaps more to come. “I am a different person in that language,” she said. “ I have a whole host of other things to express. I would maybe even like to direct in French.”
She has little else left to prove. “I’ve given everything that I have to making movies. One of the best things about having made so many movies and having been in the business for so long and just being old is that you just don’t worry anymore.”
Elaine Sciolino is a former Paris bureau chief for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum.”
Elaine Sciolino is a former Paris bureau chief for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum.”
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