(2.5 stars)
If you, like Jodie Foster, have been waiting for Jodie Foster to play a leading role in a French film, your day has finally come. (And if you, like me, somehow didn’t realize the two-time Oscar winner is a fluent French speaker, welcome! It’s true.) Foster has performed in smaller French-speaking roles, but “A Private Life” (or “Vie Privée,” for those of you like Foster) marks a new frontier.
The film from director Rebecca Zlotowski also happens to combine several elements strongly associated with Foster’s decades-long on-screen career: a buttoned-up yet translucent exterior, psychoanalytic theory and suspicious deaths. She does not play law enforcement, as in 2024’s “True Detective: Night Country,” for which she won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe, or, of course, 1991’s “The Silence of the Lambs,” for which she won an Oscar. This time, Foster is in the psychiatrist’s chair, where her flinty protagonist slowly loses her grip on reality.
“A Private Life” is slippery to categorize; like Zlotowski’s previous films, including “Other People’s Children” (2022) and “Planetarium” (2016), it flirts with genre conventions only to resist them in favor of something murkier and more evocative. Here, the director (and fellow co-writers Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé) toy with the outlines of a psychological thriller, only without the thrills or presumptive insight about the workings of the mind.
The result is a curious, and increasingly ridiculous, goose chase to uncover presumed wrongdoing after Foster’s character Lilian Steiner, a tightly wound American in Paris, learns that one of her patients has died. When Lilian shows up to the shiva, the deceased’s husband (Mathieu Amalric) lunges at her furiously, believing it was Lilian’s prescription that led to his wife’s apparent suicide.
Was her late patient (Virginie Efira) more distressed than Lilian realized? Or could it be foul play? These questions prove less interesting than how the loss affects Lilian and why she comes to make one unlikely decision after another until the real question becomes whether Lilian is totally unhinged.
Our first clue about that is also a playful introduction to the film’s off-kilter air: After she flees the crazed widower’s accusation, Lilian begins weeping involuntarily, tears streaming down her placid cheeks on the bus, during patient sessions and everywhere else. Her ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil) happens to be an eye doctor and agrees to help her investigate, but he’s not the one who cures her lachrymal affliction.
That would be a hypnotist (Sophie Guillemin) who plunges Lilian into a blood-hued interior realm, where she descends vertiginous stairs and opens various doors, including one that appears to reveal a past life.
It’s a mark of creative achievement that Zlotowski’s film manages to dwell in uncertainty — about what’s really going on, where Lilian’s marbles have gone and, for that matter, why her ex is so game to chase them around with her. Still, there’s something less than satisfying about a story that’s peculiar but not exactly funny, low-key unsettling but far from provocative, and elbow-deep in dreams and memory but without much discernible revelation.
Foster’s performance is aptly steeped in ambiguity and unsettled restraint — she maintains an analyst’s detachment even as Lilian spirals into a world of inference and conspiracy. That Foster does all this and more in French is a delight, like watching a venerable artist pull a fresh palette from her sleeve and prove even more versatile than previously imagined. (English pops out when Lilian is at her most exasperated, as when she curses her upstairs neighbor for blasting the movie’s on-the-nose opening needle drop, “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads.)
“A Private Life” pokes fun at the idea that the subconscious can be concretely interpreted, and intervened upon, for a fee that adds up to a middle-class life. It is apparent proof of her fastidiousness that Lilian records all her sessions. But it’s also a way of off-loading the essence of her work onto a machine, as though therapy were as simple as data collection. As Lilian comes to understand, what those who flop onto her couch really want most is for somebody to listen.
R. At Angelika Film Center Mosaic, Avalon Theatre and Cinema Arts Theatre. Contains some sexual content, graphic nudity, language and brief violence. In English and French with subtitles. 103 minutes.
The post Jodie Foster unravels en français in ‘A Private Life’ appeared first on Washington Post.
