Watching the immaculately controlled Jodie Foster muss up her hair and a character’s inner being is one of the low-key pleasures of the twisty French puzzler, “A Private Life.” She plays Lilian Steiner, a psychiatrist in Paris who could use some me-time on the couch. She gets some, in a way, after a patient unexpectedly dies. The death rocks Lilian, an American who switches effortlessly between French and English, and has lived in France long enough to have married there, had a son, divorced and become a grandmother. Hers is an outwardly enviable life, if more of a heavily barricaded fortress than a cultivated garden.
The French filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski has a gift for creating intriguingly complex female characters, women whose lives are at once specific to them and recognizably commonplace. In her tender drama about women, love and mothering, “Other People’s Children,” the life of a teacher, played by Virginie Efira, grows increasingly complicated after she falls for a man and develops an equally fierce bond with his young daughter. Efira has a small, pivotal role in “A Private Life” as Lilian’s dead patient, Paula, an elusive yet seductive presence who appears in slyly teasing, fragmented flashbacks. Her death might be shrouded in mystery, but there was nothing enigmatic about her effect when she was alive.
Zlotowski, working from a script that she wrote with Anne Berest, persuasively establishes the coordinates of Lilian’s cosseted, oh-so-proper haute bourgeois life with illuminating details. Everything gleams in this woman’s world, from her smart, perfect bob to the luxurious surfaces in her spacious apartment and the leather chair where she sits as her patients share their deepest and most banal concerns. Her nice, organized world begins to fall to pieces, though, when she learns that Paula has died, perhaps by suicide. Lilian is shaken by the death; she also takes it personally. “I never detected the slightest suicidal thought,” she tells her ex-husband, Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), before confiding she suspects foul play.
One of Zlotowski’s strengths as a filmmaker is her casting, and she’s filled “A Private Life” with some valuable supporting players, notably Auteuil. He and Foster fit together seamlessly, his soft, yielding presence working contrapuntally with her sharp edges. They appear together for the first time not long after Lilian flees the shiva for Paula where the dead woman’s husband, Simon (Mathieu Amalric), berates her. Amalric’s Simon, his voice rising and protuberant eyes flashing, adds a menacing shiver to the story. Soon after, Lilian discovers that her eyes won’t stop watering and she seeks treatment from Gabriel, who, conveniently, is an ophthalmologist. (Like every patient in denial, she insists that she’s fine.)
These ocular details as well as several striking overhead shots of vertigo-inducing staircases — along with Lilian’s abrupt transformation into an amateur detective — suggest that Zlotowski watched a couple of Hitchcock movies at some stage in the making of “A Private Life.” There’s a touch of “Spellbound” here, Hitchcock’s 1945 psychological thriller with Gregory Peck as a wounded soul healed by the love of a psychoanalyst played by Ingrid Bergman. Zlotowski similarly thickens her plot with romance, revelations of trauma and surrealistic visions, but with a light touch that becomes progressively playful. The more Lilian discovers, the less cleareyed she seems and the more winning her personality becomes.
The intrigue is far-fetched and surprising — this is one movie you can’t write in your head — and delivered with increasing winks and charm. That’s particularly the case once Lilian and Gabriel start making like Nick and Nora Charles, a turn that sweetens the story and points to a potential film franchise that I would like to see happen. Foster navigates the many narrative detours and tonal shifts with her customary virtuosity, but what makes the performance sing is the gentleness with which she dismantles Lilian, including the self-sovereignty that has helped isolate the character. In some roles, Foster can feel at an appreciable remove, as if she were behind a very thin membrane. Here, she uses that distance for her character, a woman who’s so stunned by death that she’s finally shocked back into life.
A Private Life Rated R for a plot thread involving suicide and for some English-language profanity. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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